GASLANDS

So I have spent a lot of money on Fantasy Flight's Star Wars X-Wing Miniatures game.
I collected all the little, beautifully detailed starfighters... and collected them frequently in triplicate.
I bought all the medium size ships flown by all kinds of scum & villainy pulled from the now defunct Expanded Universe books of Star Wars.
I even bought the Huge ships, only playable in special Epic & Cinematic play scenarios, and I never played those damn things.

In fact, I didn't play X-Wing Miniatures much at all. I had a lot of X-Wing stuff and I didn't like transporting all the cards & dice & templates & tokens & minis around. I'm not really into the competitive scene at the Friendly Local Game Stores anyway. Occasionally I'd play with my brother-in-law or get a group together for a free-for-all using my extensive collection. And we'd have fun and everyone would agree that the game was really cool, but I mostly just collected the game. For all my love of those tiny ships, I wasn't really getting much bang for my buck. My many bucks. So many bucks. 

Then I heard about Gaslands . If you're looking for more bang for your buck, Gaslands is a 99 cent thermonuclear blast.

It exists as a very thin paperback book from Osprey Publishing, purchasable online or in any well equipped FLGS for between $13-20. From there, you can cobble together some D6 dice, pencil & paper, some movement templates out of the book, and the final ingredient... some tiny cars you got from somewhere. Like old Hot Wheels from your childhood sandbox, or stolen from your 5 year old son, or purchased for $1 from any department store.

With these items you are ready to enter the Thunderdome of Post-Apocalyptic Vehicular Combat on any flat surface in your household.

In a recent game we gleefully rammed and machine gunned each other as we raced through gates (paper cut-outs) towards the finish line, taking damage and eventually falling in quick succession. At the climax, I set the only other surviving opponent's car on fire with a Molotov cocktail and accelerated away, thinking I was now cruising to an easy victory. Except the flaming hulk of his Hot Wheels car careened ahead and exploded, killing me too. No one won the game, and everyone had an amazing time.

A big part of this comes from the round structure and activation system, where you commit to a certain movement based on what gear you are in, then may roll Skid Dice based on your car's handling value to Shift up & down, gain or cancel Hazard Tokens accruing to your vehicle, and Spin and/or Slide. Next step, complete your movement and attack if you can with whatever weaponry you have crew aboard able to fire, rolling hits & evades. Finally if you've accrued too many Hazard tokens then you start rolling to see if you wipeout. The wipeout step can be fun for everyone to watch unfold too!
You keep going around activating for each gear you are in, 1-6, so if you're going fast you'll get to do more than players in a lower gear than you but you're also in danger of losing control and have less maneuver options available to you.

All this is a tremendous amount of fun, and you will feel fast.

The skinny rulebook is comprehensive in explaining gameplay, stats, teams, scenarios. The mechanics are tight and wonderfully thematic. The pace is relentless and engaging, even cinematic in places. It has amazing community support across the Internet and at Gaslands.com. You can engage with the game at your preferred level, whether firing up some old Hot Wheels across paper gates with D6s, or driving custom painted Murder Machines with mounted weaponry and blood splatter through 3D printed gates using laser cut acrylic movement templates and custom Skid Dice (all available in various Etsy stores).
You will spend more money if you start investing in custom dice, templates, terrain, & painting minis. But you absolutely don't have to.

If you want to get into miniature wargaming this is a great gateway. If you want to avoid a more hardcore wargaming scene but still want to get a bit of that thrill, this is a great game on the periphery of that scene with an incredibly low barrier to entry. If you're a regular tabletop gamer looking for something a little different and a bit wacky to try out with friends, this game is a bit of novelty that you can really get some mileage out of.

Theme:  Post-Apocalyptic Vehicular Combat
Gameplay: various racing scenarios maneuvering Hot Wheels with custom stats using movement templates.
Components: It's just a rulebook, man. Everything else is on you.
Replayability: Soooo much of this.
Rulebook: Outstanding, comprehensive.

BRASS: BIRMINGHAM

I did not have the good taste to back this game on Kickstarter when I had the chance but my brother-in-law did, and within a few weeks of trying out his KS edition I would obtain my own copy of the retail edition. A few weeks after that I caved and bought the premium chips (they come in the bigger box of the KS edition) to use as money in the game. I then made my friends play it with me several more times in 2018 as my new obsession. And I will continue to do so unapologetically because it's simply a fantastic game.

Birmingham is a reimplementation of board game classic BRASS, which I admit I did not find appealing. The art of the old game looked old & tired and the mechanics needlessly complicated, the kind of game that The I.T. Crowd made fun of in their spoof of board game YouTube reviews. Well, this new edition fixes the art problem with double-sided, beautifully detailed night & day boards of the sooty English Midlands circa the Industrial Revolution. And after playing several games, I will say that the mechanics are needfully complicated in order to craft the experience the designers want you to have.

And that experience is one of a competitive race to efficiently develop a network of varied industries across the board connecting to a selection of different markets (which are variable from game to game) where you'll make your sales, driving your income and eventual victory point gains.

Your player board will present you with your different industries as tiles in their own hierarchy of development. You'll pay money and resources using the BUILD action to get those tiles on the board into your network, which are cities you've connected by your canals (railroads in the 2nd half of the game) using the NETWORK action. You can burn lower level tiles off your player board with the DEVELOP action in order to get to the good stuff above it. The SELL action is where you go big time, flipping tiles on the board to get the income boost and access to their VP. Level II and higher industries may score twice, at the end of the canal phase and then again at end game in the railroad phase. BUT you can only sell if you're networked with a market that accepts those types of goods and IF you have a barrel of beer for each tile you flip. Beer is the lubricant that keeps this machine going, and Breweries are an industry tile you can build onto the board for yourself and other players to sip. Beer, Coal, & Iron will actually come out onto the board on their respective tiles... be careful with placement & intended use because they're available to everyone who's connected to them! But when those resources are used up off the tile, it will flip as in a SELL and the owner will get its income & VP.
You can also take a LOAN action for £30 or SCOUT to get a Wild city & industry card.
You can only do two of these actions on your turn, and you'll have to discard a card from your hand to do each action. I should point out that when you do BUILD, you'll need cards from your hand that actually match the city or the industry space on the board where you intend to place the tile. It gets tough.
The end of the canal phase will see your network scored and canals wiped from the board along with your Level I tiles. Railroads are the new big thing and they're expensive, so I hope you've got income to work with and that you can make something new of the industries you've still got on the board.

This whole mishmash of rules, actions, & phases will present you with a tense and fiddly, deeply engaging, competitive puzzle that will absolutely reward the experienced gamer. And the experienced gamer is absolutely the target audience for this handsomely updated version of a classic game.

As an aside, I did create a Spotify playlist in an attempt to create an engaging atmosphere for the game, which you can find HERE should you want to check it out to use in the future.

QUICK HITS
Theme:  Industrial Revolution
Gameplay: Economic hand management.
Components: Just fantastic even without the premium Iron Clay money chips.
Replayability: Complexity might make it harder to get to the table, but rewarding experience.
Rulebook: Really good.

Link to Brass: Birmingham on BGG...