Entering The World Of Post-Apocalyptic Vehicular Combat. Again.

It’s funny how quickly a fire can spread, especially with heavy winds. A particularly fast spreading wildfire just hit my game group hard and it has us all scrambling to keep up.  Gaslands is one of the Osprey “Blue Book” games’ series where they have a designer put together a rule system and setting in a very defined format.  The game, written/designed by Mike Hutchinson, came out last year but really took off with my group thanks to a review of it on the Secret Cabal gaming podcast.

In essence, the game rule set for miniature car/vehicle combat using template movement a la X-wing (without the hidden selection process).  The rule set is super cheap and picking it up is easy by buying the PDF of Osprey’s site or picking up a hardcopy off Amazon.

While waiting for my copy of the rules to arrive, I decided to begin getting the game ready.  I knew I’d need to make the movement templates (provided in the back of the book or printable online), acquire dice, and get the miniatures.

Starting with the minis, this would be the easiest for me since I will co-opt my Dropzone Commander models and reduce the game size from the recommended 1:64 scale Hotwheels/Matchbox size to 10mm.  The rules account for this and have recommended base sizes that you can adjust to the scale you want to use.

I printed off the new scale with the bases and tested them out with my Dropzone and Thunder Road miniatures. The 10mm Dropzone minis tend to work but overall, the bases are a bit on the small side.

Especially for things like the tanks.

Or the Battle Bus.

And the War Rig came up short, only fitting in the “trailer” portion of the base.

Though Optimus was able to push out the base size a little.  After a bit more digging and putting up a poll on the Facebook group page, I found that most players don’t base the minis and use them as is unless they need a base for stability like the aerial units or the motorcycles.  This was perfect as I didn’t really want to make a bunch of custom bases and figure out a way to temporarily mount the miniatures.

With my scale set, it was time to make some templates. The book recommends printing out the templates and gluing them to cardboard.  Since I have a slightly better setup, I opted to cut mine out of hardboard.  I didn’t want 4 feet of the stuff and be forced to cut it all down so I turned to the standard clipboard. At $1.84 at Walmart, I couldn’t find a better option.

They will ride a little thicker than I’d like but not so thick to be unusable.

Running the calipers, I set the thickness in my CNC Machine, import the templates from the printable file, and it all set up fairly quickly.

No real issues with the CNC on this project except I didn’t have the cut run deep enough and it randomly froze part way through the job.  I think that was just a software glitch.  After re-calibrating, I ran the program a second time and things cut through a little better.

After a bit of finishing to smooth out the edges, I had a set of movement templates all cut out.

In a related note, the designer made a little contest to post high quality pics of your War Rig to include in an upcoming free print-n-play expansion.  If he likes your image, he’ll put it in the art layout.

While my little micro machine War Rig isn’t over the top like I’ve seen elsewhere, I thought it might work out for the book.  He wanted a flat white background which was fun to build since I don’t have a dedicated light box.

But I do know how to set up a basic still shot so all-in-all, it was pretty easy to do.  We’ll see if it isgood enough to make the final layout.