The Voivod and I have been playing our share of Gaslands the past couple of months, and generally had a good time doing so.
However, yesterday, we hit a bit of a speedbump.
We play weekly, just 1 on 1, and just like we used to do with X-Wing, we bring a different list every game. This week, I brought a Rutherford list, with just one car at exactly 50 cans:
Pickup Truck
- Minigun Turret
- Armoured Plating
- Headshot
- Rapid Fire
- Loader
- Return Fire
And it completely obliterated his Miyakazi list, consisting of two cars. My car was slow, but it took just two salvos per car to destroy his team (actually only one for the first, as that one was already damaged due to a collision with an obstruction). it was so one-sided that he remarked I had managed to break the game.
My initial reaction was; yeah well; you broke Tanks! in our very first game, so now we're even
But obviously he had a point.
Maybe we missed something in the rules about restrictions on Perks and/or Upgrades/Weapons?
An initial idea was to house-rule certain restrictions. For instance, we already found that turret weapons are king in this game, and combined with the minigun, whilst woefully expensive, might just be a bit too much. Then again; one such turret costs more than a bunch of bare-bones vehicles, so for the price of a turret you could have an entire kitted out buggy. So maybe the balance is there after all?
In the end though, after analyzing our (very short) last game, I realized that the match-up had just been very unfortunate, and that I had also had my share of luck. But the Tank-that's-not-an-actual-tank is a rock hard contender for sure.
We then started to come up with counter lists, and one that would be just as un-fun to play against would be 10 bare-bones bikes. Just too many very fast targets to kill all of them. Which then sparked a discussion about local meta's, and how us playing just each other differs from playing different opponents each week, or games with more than two players, as that would force players to bring a more rounded list.
I will not be playing this list again; as I said, a different one each week, but I still might just bring it to a multiplayer game (if we ever have one). If only to see how it will fare in a more target-rich environment.
Has anyone else encountered any such lopsided situations with Gaslands so far? And what have you done about them?