Saturday Night Stardust

  Zig and I dusted off Stardust, my first set of complete tabletop wargame rules which I put wrote about seven years ago. It's a starship a battle game set in a generic, non-specific universe that allows players to use whatever starship models they have in their collections. Stardust has always delivered an entertaining game and it was nice to see it back on the dining room table.

I commanded the Elip fleet - the tan and teal, while Ziggy pushed the Khans in red.

My starting units were much stronger than Ziggy's but he had reinforcements on the way. I needed to do some real damage quick before I'd be at a disadvantage.

Some opening moves and some idea of which ships are which.

Things start heating up. Khan frigates start disappearing at an alarming rate. Rather than sending both heavy cruisers into the middle and risk them both getting chewed up, I send one back around the asteroids to be intact for the reinforcements.

And there they are, at the earliest opportunity. I send one heavy and one light cruiser to deal with the new threat as the other pair and the interceptors hang back to mop up the carrier group. I was starting to lose interceptors, in part due to "ACD" or "Asteroid Collision Death."

 

And there they are. two destroyers, two frigates and a heavy cruiser.

The Khan fleet moves to consolidate whilst I look for early opportunities to do some damage to the new arrivals.

Allowing the reds to consolidate wouldn't be prudent, so I figured it would be wise to focus on removing the carrier which I had a real beef with at this stage of the game. I hammered it hard and a lucky hit from a torpedo sent it to the space graveyard. You can't tell it, but I also lost one of my light cruisers at the same time. :(  

Setting up for the final exchanges.

My cruisers brace! It's going to be nasty.

Loads of damage is dealt. I lost a heavy cruiser to just one destroyer killed. The carrier's escort began fleeing, having had enough of battle for a day.

The intervening 10 minutes since the previous photograph was rather eventful as I lost another heavy cruiser, the Khan heavy cruiser was sent packing as were the red frigates. The escort regained its composure and rejoined the fight. 

The remnants of the fleets savage one another.

And all that's left is a couple Elip interceptors and the fighters from the carrier. An utter bloodbath with no real winner except for Death himself!

Well that was a blast! I wasn't sure about game and strength balance when I put the scenario together, I was just hoping for something "sort of close." That was VERY CLOSE! Of course, ZIggy's miserable dice rolls helped balance things a bit - there was one point where he rolled 12 eight-siders needing 6+ to hit and landed exactly { 0 }. The only regular success he had was shooting down my torpedoes. All in all though, it was a well-fought affair and we both had a really fun time.