"Mad Maximillian v. Gaslands?" Topic

I haven't come across a comparative review of Mad Maximillian and Gaslands. Is there on out there?

Or would anyone who's had a chance to play both care to comment on the relative strengths and weaknesses for gameplay?

This won't be a detailed review.

Gaslands uses turn templates that are similar to X-Wing. For me, the turn templates worked fine for X-Wing but don't seem right for a car race. You have to move EXACTLY along the templates; you cannot make a wider turn. You also spend a lot of time hunting for the correct template.

Mad Max uses a turn gauge, that I think works much better. The steeper the turn, the more you are penalized in your skill roll to see if bad things happen.

Both games suffer from everybody standing around watching one person do stuff, because vehicles activate one at a time. Walt O'Hara runs large convention games of Mad Max that are popular and fun, but it SEEMS like a lot of time people are standing around watching the active player do something. That works fine on club night, but it doesn't seem to scale to large games. Walt seems to be able to make it work, though.

Buck

I have played Gaslands. The most efficient way to destroy your opponent is with pistol fire.

I've played both. I prefer Gaslands, but certainly agree with Buck's assessment above.

- I own the Gaslands book which I found easier to use as a game reference. I don't own Mad Maximillian, but when we were referencing it during the game we had difficulty locating rules and parsing some of the explanations within it.
- I dig the overall setting and feel of Gaslands more. I was able to knock together a handful of vehicles with matchbox cars and bits, where I feel the Mad Maximillian setting deserves period appropriate custom cars.
- I like the variety of vehicles in Gaslands, the array of weapons and upgrades, the driver perks and the fairly easy method of putting together some custom rides.
- I am pretty skeptical of Gasland's point costs and balance. In Gaslands passengers who aren't driving or manning weapons can shoot with pistols (as whill4 mentions above). It may be our inexperience with the rules, but our group found a bus full of passengers shooting out the windows with pistols an unholy terror that obliterated anything that came close. That didn't seem to jive with pop culture's depiction of post-apocalyptic car duels. When teaching new gamers I skip the pistols and the game seems to run fine without them.

Take all of this with a grain of salt. I've played Mad Maximillian once and Gaslands only a handful of times.

That's all helpful, thanks.

The concept game I'm mulling over wouldn't do harm to the Mad Maximillian idiom.

Wacky Races boardgame is due out next month. As written, it's for up to 6 players. But looks light and fast enough that it could be expanded up to 8 or 10 with additional track sections and event cards. Buying a second set for more components would also yield a second set of miniatures…. which leads to conversions for the post-apoc gaming!

Wacky Raceland comics were published by DC in 2017 for the dark post-apoc version (and surprisingly good too!). Converting the models to somewhere between the Wacky Raceland image and the original would be fairly easy and fun to do.

Steve Jackson will be re-booting Car Wars this year. I suspect he's going to keep it pretty close to the original mechanics for nostalgia's sake; though I'm hoping it might get more streamlined.

And 7TV Post-Apoc with vehicle rules is also in the pipeline.

I'll be keeping an eye on those too to see which of all the options is likely to yield the fastest play.