Gaslands: Refuelled is the new expanded and revised edition of the Gaslands, incorporating everything we have heard from the players since the game’s initial release in 2017. We hope you will find it contains the same awesome auto-carnage as before, but sleeker, slicker and more evenly balanced.
With the release of the revised edition of Gaslands, a lot of people will ask what has changed in the new Gaslands rules.
When it comes to the core rules, the answer is not much. If you are familiar with Gaslands already, you’ll find there are a couple of little changes here and there, but they might not leap out right away. To avoid any gotcha moments, here’s a summary of some of the changes. Please share this post with anyone you think might want to know these little tweaks.
Activations and Passing
If you don’t have any vehicles left that can activate when you turn comes up, you have to “pass”. Before you pass, you get a chance to spend audience votes, which can result in you having a vehicle that can activate. Once all have players passed consecutively, the gear phase ends.
This is basically the same as it was before but is much clearer to explain, particularly to new games coming to wargames from boardgames.
Pro-Tip: Because the gear phase ends when all players have passed consecutively, there is still a bit of flexibility in when you choose to spend your votes. Say you have pole position, your opponent has two vehicles to activate and you have none, but you have one that could use “Burn Rubber” to get an activation. You could spend the votes right at the start of the gear phase, as you have pole, or you could spend them after you opponents first or second activation: giving you quite a lot of flexibility in how you choose to affect the game.
Crew
Crew works slightly differently, with no more “assigning” of crew. The new rule is this:
During its attack step, a vehicle may attack any number of times up to the crew value of the vehicle. Each weapon a vehicle is armed with may only be selected to attack once during a single attack step.
This means blitz had to change its wording a bit.
Weapons and Upgrades
Other things that changed:
- Fire needs to cause damage to set you on fire. It rarely matters, but the wording is important for the new Cult of the Inferno sponsor.
- Smoke now distracts you and can’t be negated with big tyres.
- Rams and Explosive rams are upgrades now.
- You can evade explosions.
- Rams ignore hazards all the time now, not just in your activation. They are also upgrades now, rather than weapons (same with Exploding Rams).
- Rockets don’t do blast anymore.
- You can now reload upgrades.
- You can’t nitro backwards anymore 🙃
Sponsors and Perks
Slime has changed a fair bit. Pinball is a touch easier (and now the place that the otherwise unnecessary “side-swipe” rule appears). She can take rams for 0 build slots. She also gets a new pair of perk classes. The shift in perk classes was partly to give her access to a better spread of complementary abilities, and partly to better balance the perk class access across the newly expanded list of factions.
Technology got two new perks, thanks to Experimental Teleporter and Experimental Nuclear Engine becoming upgrades.
Speed got two replacement perks, as there were a couple of lemons in there.
Other Stuff
If you collide whilst in the process of getting wrecked, you are removed from play.
War Rigs are a little tougher now, with 26 hull. Why 26 you ask? That’s the maximum that fits on the official dashboard card layout! 25 would leave a lone hull box hanging off the edge, which upsets me.
The cost of lots of the weapons, upgrade and perks have been tweaked, and some options got dropped altogether, so you may find your go-to team lists have changed. I won’t go into detail on all the weapon and perk changes but be sure to double-check your teams the first few times you play with the new Refuelled book.
New Version vs Old
I’m really happy with the new book, but I don’t want to demand every player pick it up. The core rules of the game are 95% unchanged, and I’ve summarised the last 5% here. I hope everyone will choose to pick up a copy because it’s gloriously hardback and stuffed with awesome new illustrations and photos from the community, but if you don’t, no-one will stop you playing Gaslands.
If you are playing with a group that contains someone with the new book, play the revised rules. If someone has access to the new book, then play the revised rules.
Of course, the basic rule never changes: your table, your rules!
If you want to check out all the tweaks and changes yourself, grab yourself a copy of the new rulebook from our store.