Saturday-ness

I made some good progress on the Invaders yesterday, although I'm really starting to hate the spindly legs of the Tripods - particularly the small Tripods.

The swarm thusfar...

Zig and I also had another StarDust Ground playtest. It was more of a scenario balance test than a game mechanics test. Regardless, it was a fun game and I took some pics. No full AAR this time.

I drove the bugs this time. I had a long slog going across the table length-wise but also had plenty of cover.

The first evac chopper arrives.

My bugs make contact

And make short work of the humans.

The second evacuation craft arrives. Things are getting dicey for the Red Guard now!

The last Red Guard squad tries to hold out!

But is beset by the horrific space-worms and wiped out.

Game over, man! Game over! Zig did manage to evacuate six stands - not bad. A third load of troops would have been difficult given the situation.

Ziggy didn't realize he could have moved his guys out to the islets off the shore - I should have explained that a bit better. I'm still left with a couple of questions in my mind about the scenario, but it worked pretty well as it was. I'm still very pleased with the game system itself and don't need to make any adjustments to the rules based on the results of the game! That's very positive.

Boring Old Update...

I've just been doing some assembly and painting this week. I got really off task early when I traded in my Infinity figures to the LGS for store credit. I ended up with the Dystopian Wars Invaders box set and still have some credit. One thing led to another and now instead of being a good boy and working on the French Air Fleet, I'm working on DW alien ships.

That escalated quickly...

The box was missing legs for one of the small tripods - Spartan is sending replacements. Yay! Mike also has an Invader fleet; we're looking at a Invaders vs Earthling event for Gnomecon. We need to work out details but the idea sounds fun.

More 15mm Sci-Fi playtesting Saturday then X-Wing on Sunday. Be well!

15mm Sci Fi

My wife was kind enough to help me play-test my 15mm Sci-Fi ground combat rules Saturday evening. The rules have gone through some major revisions since the first game, months ago. The changes have been effective, as far as achieving my goals of quick-play, simple mechanics and fun. I think they're getting close to being "done."

Last night's game featured my wife running a horde of space bugs (see Starship Troopers) versus the stout infantry of the Red Guard commanded by yours truly.

Our initial setups. Many of those hills are either recent creations or re-treads done this week.

My boys get the festivities started by blasting away at some distant flying bugs.

I'm starting to think I don't have enough guns for all of these critters.

At the end of turn 1, the bugs were almost upon my troops and I'd made almost no progress in thinning the herd.

Turn 2 starts out well, the nearest squad of flying bugs is destroyed in a hail of gunfire! 

But the other group of fliers descends upon my squad between the hills.

On the other side of the hill, the squad with the missile launcher wipes out the elite Orange bugs. 

My squads over by the village start to feel the heat from the quick-moving Blues.

Turn 3 begins with the big bug spewing bioplasma towards my squad with the missile launcher, killing a stand.

The squad over by the farm, all the way to my left wipes out a group of Blues!

But  the rest of my line is engaged with the horde. Crunch time is now.

And by the end of turn 3, the entire swarm is within striking distance of all of my troops. 

The squad all the way on my right is in deep kimchi, and the guys on the hill to the left are about to be in it too.

My left flank isn't much better off.

And then the second wave appears. This is going to hurt.

Turn 5 begins with my right-most squad being eliminated. Boooooooo...

But my left flank squad eliminates yet another squad of the enemy. These guys are turning out to be real bug-smashers!

Bugzilla claims another victim.

Turn 6 and the Exterminators finish off yet another squad of giant space critters! 

 The large squad on the hill is now being munched on by three enemy squads!

And it doesn't turn out well for our heroes.

The way it wrapped up. The outcome wasn't in doubt.

The game ran very well and I found a couple things in need of clarification / rewriting. I've re-done the Close Combat mechanics four times and now I'm very happy with the Close Combat system, except that it isn't as deadly as it should be. Melees were a bit of a slog; it was a bit difficult to kill stands in CC, but that's a simple fix which I've already implemented. It didn't help that my wife's close combat dice rolls were miserable - 80% 1's and 2's. When she'd throw a 5+ her bugs did what they were supposed to.

The scenario itself was never intended to be balanced. It was an experiment to see how long the human force could hold out. I think they did OK. They were able to handle the first wave and probably would have seen them off entirely. Wave two really screwed things up and gave the bug army the upper hand.

Some Weekend Gaming

I managed a bit of gaming over the weekend, and even got my wife to sit down and play for a bit. I tried her out on Anima Tactics. It's a simple enough system, although we disregarded the characters' special abilities in the interest of simplicity. Of course doing so reduces one's options in the game but it was still fun. My group is Azure Alliance while my wife was using Black Sun nasties.

We set up a graveyard-themed battlefield. Many of her characters were undead so that was pretty fitting. This was also the debut of the Japanese hut I'd made a few months ago.

For the most part, our warbands duked it out in the middle of the field. There was some trickeration involved with trying to get the other person to burn all their action tokens to prevent dodges later in the turn.

Ender wanted to see what was going on. He approved.

 Ender's look-alike was the first to go.

He was soon followed by the scantily-clad lass who was the focus of much attention in the earlier photo (three pics back).

Deadmoon and Jerry (the gal with the cloak and the brown and orange fellow) weapon-high-five after bringing down the raven-laden goth.

The bird-brain in his new home.

The cemetery was rapidly filling up with fresh corpses. I guess some of those corpses weren't really so fresh after all.

The final critter in her group falls - a flying Frankenstein's monster that Jerome had actually been fighting for much of the game. He'd broken away from it earlier to help Deadmoon in her fight but the pair were reunited to end the game.

I really want to try AT again playing the right way, with special abilities, etc. I think after the play through, Wifey won't have any trouble with it.

Saturday evening I didn't feel like setting up the gaming table so Zig and I played X-Wing. He doesn't play very often, not that I do, but I do play a lot more than him. We did 120 points and He took the Rebels. I was happy to use the evil Empire - I normally play with the Rebels and wanted the change of pace.

Our initial setups. I took two high-end TIE Interceptors, the shuttle (for comedy purposes) and Vader.

Part way through. I hammered the Y-Wing from the get-go. I'm not a fan of Ion Turrets.

As things wore on, the shuttle and Carnor Jax's red Interceptor were blasted to bits as was the B-Wing.

A few turns later, Wedge Antilles killed off the second Interceptor while Vader took out the Red Shirt X-Wing. Which left us with this:

Lord Vader and Wedge in a fly-by. We flew around for maybe ten turns. I hit him a few times, he shot me once. Neither one of us could get a definitive advantage so we declared it a draw. It was a damn good game with a great ending.

The Beginning (of 2015)

I managed to wrap up a few models during the week and got in a game of X-Wing with Junior on New Year's Day. First up are some light bombers from the Dystopian Wars French Air box set Zig gave me for Christmas.

The air components for my French will be predominantly white, as opposed to the blue I used on the ships. If I ever to French land forces they'll be mostly red.

Next up is a little critter I picked up just to paint. It's an Anima Tactics Hellhound.

I have a good selection of AT stuff but I've only ever played it once. The models are gorgeous and I do like painting them. Maybe one day I'll put it on the tabletop again.

Finally is Stampy 3. The largest model I've painted in a while. It's a Dystopian Wars mobile airfield for my Empire of the Blazing Sun forces. I don't care much for painting large models with lots of detail so I'm not going to lie, I didn't try my hardest on this beast.

I think I tend to get burned out working on one model for so long that I just get sick of it. Regardless, it's good enough for my tabletop and should be a hoot to play with.

I took some pics of the X-Wing game. We played the scenario that comes with the VT-49 set which features the VT-49 and two chump TIE fighters versus four Rebels totaling 100 points. The Rebels only get two of their ships (Imperial choice) for the first three turns.

He chose my Y-Wing and E-Wing to start against. Here we have a massive traffic problem in the center. The VT-49 has a turret and he worked on my Y-Wing until it went away.

This unfortunate TIE fighter was hovering next to the map edge at the end of turn 3. I placed my reinforcements right on his tail. You don't get many opportunities like that.

Spot the difference between the two pictures above.

And then my A-Wing goes away. (The rubble marker in front of the X-Wing).

And a turn later my X-Wing is up in flames. The damaged E-Wing and heavily damaged VT-49 duke it out for a few turns but in the end my E-Wing got the better of the lumbering Imperial scow. It's 0 agility compared to the 3 agility of the E-Wing was the difference maker. He had a tough time hitting my ship while shooting the Decimator was a walk in the park. Either way, it was a fun scenario and an enjoyable game.