Road Warriors

Last summer I stumbled on some YouTube vids of Gaslands and felt a wave of nostalgia for Car Wars, a game which played a significant role in my failure to pass my second year exams at University some 30-plus years ago.

There are some truly talented and dedicated modellers out there making incredible car conversions for Gaslands - do a google search - and I make no claim to be counted amongst them, but I've had a lot of fun over the past year or so mangling Hot Wheels cars with files, drills and superglue, and then sploshing paint and dirt all over them with gay abandon. This is the secret of Gaslands' success - using cheap and accessible toy cars for the miniatures. Every trip to the supermarket now becomes a visit to a wargames shop!

First, three early attempts, done almost entirely with bits and pieces lying round the house. The armour sections are just card, the wire mesh is made from that netting stuff that garlic bulbs come in, gun barrels and spikes are bits of toothpick. The rear oil dropper on the green car is a 13 amp fuse, and the armoured wheel sections on the yellow car are from old 1/700 plastic tank traps. The only 'new' bit is the rocket launcher on the roof of the yellow car, which is from Ramshackle. I added it recently, to replace the original version made from a rawl plug which looked utterly pants.

Next, a couple of gangs in team colours, originally intended for Gaslands. One high tech and slick, and the other a bunch of grungy wastelanders. Weapons, armour and crew are all Ramshackle.

A pair of recent conversions and a wreck:

A biker gang from Ramshackle. I'm not terribly keen on these to be honest. The figures seem underscale, and the bikes even smaller so that they look like they're on scooters. I used them as an experiment in "white undercoat and wash" technique, which is alien to me as a dyed-in-the-wool black undercoat guy, and as a result they came out more vibrant and colourful than I'd intended. I like to think of them as the Gay Bikers on Acid. They still need to be based properly.

Spot the guy who's decided he doesn't want to be a member of this gang anymore.

No post-apocalyptic vehicle collection is complete without a truck, or as we in the UK like to call it: a lorry. The trailer is rather short to qualify as a big rig, but that didn't stop me from using it for a recent playthrough of the Car Wars "choose your own adventure" style solo campaign Convoy. I just used a card base of the correct length that extended out past the rear of the trailer, and made all measurements from that.

 And finally, saving the best for last, is Transport For London's new proposal for public transport post-Brexit. Passengers will be required to present their blue passports when boarding. This is the bus I used to get to school. Yes, when I were a lad we had to get t'bus to school through regions of irradiated wasteland inhabited by psychotic gangs. Tell that to kids today and they won't believe you.

In the end though the Gaslands rules weren't to my taste. I found them to be a little too silly and too random, and the car 'design' system to be far too limited. I'm sure they're good for playing with kids or non-wargamers, and they are kind of fun for a quick game, but I just found myself comparing them to Car Wars and the halcyon days of my misspent youth.

So I went ahead and bought the Car Wars Compendium rules, and made up some 3x scale road sections and counters (for smoke, mines etc). The verdict? I don't care that it's not 'fast-play', that it takes around 3 hours to do 10 seconds of game time, or that there's enough bookkeeping for an accountancy exam. Car Wars is still great.