Geargrave Outlands
A deterministic road-war tactics game where every wreck is a choice. No dice: every ram, salvo and boarding lands exactly as your plan shows. Board the tanker and drive it home, shoot it to scrap, or talk the gang down. How you stop them decides what you keep.
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Overview
Summary
A deterministic road-war tactics game where every wreck is a choice. No dice: every ram, salvo and boarding lands exactly as your plan shows. Board the tanker and drive it home, shoot it to scrap, or talk the gang down. How you stop them decides what you keep.
Description
About This Game
Every wreck is a choice.
Out here, anything with wheels on the horizon is a threat and a prize at the same time. A tanker worth more than your whole convoy. A war rig with a crew you could use. A gang that would like your water.
Geargrave Outlands is a turn-based road-war tactics game with no dice. The fight resolves exactly as planned, so the only thing between you and the prize is how well you plan. Board that tanker and you drive it home. Shoot it to pieces and you strip it for parts. Blow it up and all you get is ash and a story.
Note: You won't drive vehicles in 1st person perspective in this game - it is turn based strategy!
No dice. No hidden rolls. No "95 % and missed."
The enemy commits first, then you plan, then the round resolves by fixed rules. There are no hit chances and nothing is rolled behind your back. Before you commit, the plan panel shows what every order will do: the exact damage of a salvo against the armor it hits, where every vehicle ends up after the move, what a ram costs both sides, and whether your boarding party makes it across.
The enemy isn't a black box either. Before you commit, you see what every rig has committed to this round: who it's shooting and with what, who it's going to ram, who it wants to board or rope, and when it is reloading and open. A gang leader announces a capstone a full round before it lands. What you don't see is where exactly they'll drive. Getting out of the way is your job.
If a plan fails, the round replay shows you why: it puts the path you planned next to the path you actually drove.
What stays random, so nobody is surprised: the road battle has no randomness at all. Outside of it, the wasteland still rolls: road events, conversation checks (the percentage is shown on the choice) and how much is actually in a wreck's trunk.
Road war on five lanes
Combat is a running battle on five lanes plus both shoulders. The ditch beyond them is the only cliff in the system. Your convoy and the gang share the same stretch of road, closing in and breaking away as speed and position shift. Ram them, sideswipe them, throw a rope across, put a salvo into the thin rear armor, crack an engine block and watch the rig fall back. It's small enough to hold the whole battle in your head and deep enough that every round is a real decision.
Every enemy has two health bars: hull and morale, so every target offers two paths. Grind it down with fire and rams, or break the crew's nerve and take the whole thing intact. Send your politician to the front and talk an entire gang into surrender. Pacifism is a build path, not a mercy.
Every fight runs on a decisive clock of 10 to 16 rounds, depending on how bad the odds look. Nothing grinds into a stalemate: when the clock runs out, whoever holds the road keeps it and the other side breaks contact.
Every wreck is a choice
Salvage isn't a menu you clear after the fight. It's the point of the fight. What is left of a vehicle depends on how you stopped it:
Board it, or make its crew surrender: full salvage, and the vehicle itself. Put a driver behind the wheel and it joins your convoy. If the engine is dead, tow it home or load it onto a lowboy's deck. A crew that surrendered can be recruited, and a tanker taken intact pays out its tank.
Put a sniper round through the driver: the crew bails on foot and the rig stands there untouched. Full salvage.
Shoot it to pieces: half the salvage and a handful of spare parts. The hull is scrap now. Strip it for tires, parts and half its mounted upgrades, but it isn't driving anywhere.
Blow it up: next to nothing.
Let it run: the gang dumps its cargo to get away.
The tactical decision in combat is the loot decision. Fight surgically and the wasteland pays you. Fight sloppily and you burn the reward along with the enemy.
The same rule cuts the other way: a rig you lose on the road stays lost. Every vehicle you send to the front is a choice too.
Your fleet is built from what you kept
Vehicles don't have classes. They have builds, and the builds come from what you're carrying. A ram plow, a monster-truck chassis, a lucky dashboard trophy, a veteran driver: each one pushes a vehicle toward one of seven Road Doctrines (Ram, Sniper, Boarding, Negotiation, Roadblock, Rush and Warranty). Stack enough and the rig earns passive bonuses and a signature capstone ability, a once-a-battle finisher. Sell the espresso machine in your cargo bay and your build quietly changes. Nothing is bought from a skill menu. Everything comes from the machine you actually drive, and very often that is the machine you boarded last week.
A wasteland that remembers
Five major factions and two regional powers hold grudges and favors, and their gangs fight by ten distinct doctrines: the Field Greys' shear-wall, the Rust Wolves' blood-debt (a pack that never flees), the Cult's bait-runs. Release prisoners and word gets around. Rob them and it gets around faster. Recruit an ex-cultist and suddenly the cult will talk to you. Your 69 named characters carry origins, loyalties and grudges of their own. Feuding factions in the same cab lose morale; war buddies fight harder side by side.
Every enemy is a person, not a statblock: each gang member has a name, a face, an age and a role, and exactly one of them is the leader. Put the leader down and watch the rest reconsider.
Survival is arithmetic
Water is one per head per day. Diesel is the difference between a shortcut and a detour. Tires die on the dirt. The world map forecasts your stores in plain language ("lasts 5 days") and warns you before it punishes you, so a bad run is a story, not a spreadsheet ambush.
And it's funny, in the way the end of the world is funny
A mayor who washes his white limousine with drinking water. A cult that worships the Great Discount and reads a 41-meter receipt as prophecy. A robot bookkeeper named Cap whose love language is inventory. Neon dashboard mascots, holy to extinct pre-war cults, that grant real combat bonuses and cost you something every time.
Only two things survived the apocalypse intact: the road sweepers and the car insurance industry. So if you'd rather not bet a rig on your own planning, Geargrave Outlands is, as far as we know, the first car combat game that lets you take out an insurance policy. It is issued by the Field Greys, the Sparkplug Cult or the Free Nomads, depending on who's underwriting at the dealership that day. What the policy is called has nothing to do with what it covers. The small print arrives by radio. We recommend reading it.
Currently in Early Access — and already a full game
Two hand-built campaigns, each its own region, tone and quest chain:
Sector East — "Dry Tanks": the survival-scavenger opener. Get the convoy moving before it dies of thirst.
Sector West — "Rescue Rudolph!": an alpine detective mystery with a real twist and three different endings.
80 hand-authored encounters and 120 road events, from roadblocks and arena ladders to boss duels, plus a procedural encounter generator that casts fresh gangs by faction and threat tier for the space between story beats.
58 vehicle types to fight, board and take home, from buggies and battle buses to tanks, tankers, monster trucks, a road-train mobile base and walking battle frames. Each has its own role, tow class and signature abilities like flak barrages, EMP and stun pulses.
Seven factions: a toll-collecting convoy guild, disciplined military remnants, a discount-worshipping cult, raider packs, nomad clans, a samurai escort guild in the Ridge Provinces and the Winterwacht of the frozen West. Each has its own loadouts, barks and long memory.
The full systems suite, live: Road Doctrines & capstones, boarding, sniping, negotiation, ramming, towing, structural parts, mascots, faction reputation, and crew loyalty & synergies.
Three difficulty levels (Light / Normal / Brutal), tuned by a deterministic balance simulator that plays every encounter hundreds of times.
A campaign the game provably can't soft-lock: a deterministic audit proves every critical objective stays reachable even if you lose your best vehicles and your best people.
40 Steam Achievements and eleven fully translated languages (EN, DE, FR, ES, IT, JA, ZH, RU, PT, PL and, new, 한국어): every line of interface, story and dialogue, close to 17,000 strings in each.
Mod support, built in. A mod is a single folder of JSON, images and sound files: its own map, factions, quests, battles, NPC dialogue, recruitable crew, vehicles, ending comic and music. You don't need an SDK or any code. Drop the folder into the game's levels folder and it shows up in the level picker as a Community Mod. The game checks every mod when it loads and tells you exactly which file and which line are wrong. Mods contain data only and can't run code on your machine. The modding guide, JSON schemas and a complete example mod are on our support page.
Full controller support. Every screen is pad-navigable with rebindable keys, and the three screens where the game actually lives (the road battle, the salvage hall, the convoy order) were built for the stick, not bolted onto it. (Steam Deck Verified is not a target for Early Access; see below.)
Help shape it from inside the game. Press Ctrl+T to fix any line of the translation in your own language, or F10 to point at an image that looks wrong. Both go straight to our public support page on GitHub:
