Sci Fi Week

Last week I spent most of the week visiting the kids.  A (who's now 9, 10 in a little over a month) called me a month or so ago and asked me if I had any sci fi figs.  I rattled off what I had painted and raw lead and asked him why.  He told me about a video he had watched on YouTube by a Warhammer gamer about making your own buildings.  He was stoked and proceeded to cut up some a plastic bottle and glue a straw and bottle cap to it to make a storage tank.  Well, he never got around to making the building out of foam-core board, but I showed him an even easier way to 15mm sci fi buildings - spray painting some plastic electrical boxes.  We got a piece of tan foam-core board and lightly over-sprayed it with green spots.  We got some fake aquarium plants at Walmart and had an instant game board.  I painted up some Rebel Minis Earth Force figures and brought them with, along with some Scourge and some Khurasan Huntarrs, for us to play around with.  Unfortunately, I didn't get a good picture of the Scourge.  We got in three games.  He beat me each time.  The first game was very close, but when he understood the concept of creating rules, he just couldn't stop! 



Initially, the rules were very simple.  Turn order was Move, Conduct lightning strikes, Shoot.  Figures could move 6", 3" if climbing on the "mountain" or moving through/up/down inside buildings.  Range to shoot was 12" and you had to roll 8+ to hit, with a -2 if the target was in cover, and a +1 at less than 3" range.  All shooting was simultaneous.  Figures were figured to be in cover if they were partially behind something from the shooter's perspective.  Initially, I didn't intend for figures to be able to shoot multiple times, but it quickly devolved to that, with no additional modifiers. 

So, yes, this planet has a problem with electrical storms.  On a 5+, lightning struck the board.  We divided the board up into 36 equal areas, each 3-1/3" high by 5" wide (the board was 6 areas wide by 6 areas high - roll a die for each axis to determine which area was struck).  If a figure was in an area struck by lightning, it rolled for a hit, just like shooting.  On an 8+ it was dead.  The nails sitting on the board are lightning rods.  If the figure was within 2" of the longer nails or 1" of the shorter screws when lightning struck the area, the figure was safe.  (The lightning strikes were A's idea, needless to say!)  We didn't have any figures die from lightning strikes, but there were a few close calls where it struck an area adjacent to the figures or struck an area where figures were near a lightning rod. 

We had a lot of fun shooting each other up and moving figures around on the board.  With eight figures a side, games were short and bloody. 

The upended figure at left is dead from opposing fire.

A private and corporal (from left) rounding a building.

Enemies square off on a roof top.

A Huntarr (you know what this really is).  We used them in a

game but the rules we used didn't work too well.  The boy

wanted two hits to kill the good guys and three to kill

the Huntar, but the Huntarr had to be visible to attack or

 shoot, and could only shoot 6".  He died faster than he

could kill his opponents.

A pair of soldiers looking for the Huntarr and sticking close

to a lightning rod, just in case.

The mastermind himself, along with one of

the board set-ups we used. 

 

 

We had a grand time, but I have to paint up some new figures now as I left the ones I painted with him to play around with.  We also got in a game of Settlers with sister J.  I won that one.  And we played our first game of Flash Point, a cooperative fire fighting/victim rescuing game.  We used the basic rules to get a feeling for the game, and it was close.  J was pretty lucky for most of the game and there wasn't much fire on her edge of the board.  A and I kept running into more and more fire and at the end of the game, most of the house was on fire with the exception of J's corner where it was still mostly under control.  We did lose three victims, though, so getting the seventh out safely was a necessity.  Fortunately, nothing bad happened and we were able to rescue her.  A and I also watched The Empire Strikes Back.  All in all we had a great time.  Next week, J comes to stay with me for three weeks.  Wondering what we'll get into then!



Lost in Space

I bought X-Wing a few months ago and it's been sitting in my dining room awaiting an opportunity to play.  I brought it with me, along with the Millennium Falcon, when I visited my kids in Idaho, knowing that my son at least would like the game.  We played our first game on Friday.  Actually we played our first four or five games on Friday.  The first game was a standard two Tie fighters versus the X-Wing.  I gave the two Ties to my son thinking that it would give him a bit of an advantage.  It was a very close game, but I ended up winning that one although the X-Wing was down to 1 or 2 damage points remaining.

The master plotting his move. 

The final dice roll.

 

 

The second game was the Millennium Falcon against the two Ties.  This time, the boy was the Falcon and I had the Ties.  The Falcon was down to just a couple of damage points remaining when he blasted my second Tie.  

 

 

 

The third game, I think, he insisted on playing with two Ties against an X-Wing and a Y-Wing with some asteroids scattered around.  I warned him that it was unbalanced in favor of the Rebel players, but he wanted to do it anyway.  In the end, I think the Y-Wing had lost a couple of shields and maybe a point or two of damage when the second Tie bit the dust.

 

 

Felt like we were playing the game all day.  It was a lot of fun, though.  We tried the advanced rules but they didn't really stick with him so we didn't really get the full effect. 

 

He got sidetracked part-way through playing by the Nerf guns that I had sent earlier in the week so we could chase each other around the house when cabin fever set in.  We spent a lot of time having Nerf wars in addition to X-Wing.  Productive weekend, all-in-all.











Snap Shot: a Blast from the Past

Last week the boy asked if we could play a game.  "Sure," I said, "what do you want to play?"  He goes up to my room and brings down Snap Shot.  I tried to explain to him that it's a pretty complex game for a 7-year-old, but he would not be deterred.  So through the week we set up the characters and the animals (we played the introductory scenario, where the animals escape from their cages on the scout ship).  This morning, we finally had time to play it.  He decided he wanted to be the animals, so I was the four crewmen.  Since their starting positions are set by the scenario, there really wasn't a lot of choices to make, but I did make sure that the three crew with heavier weapons were in the forward part of the ship, while the guy who only had the snub pistol was in the drive room, since he was likely to either be attacked first, or get locked in the drive room when the iris valves were shut from the bridge. 

The boy didn't have a bad strategy and I was able to lock one animal in a stateroom, although they had full control of the Common Area.  One also got trapped in the Air/Raft Berth by the closing of the iris valves.  Once my crew had weapons, I opened the stateroom to work on taking out the beast in there only to realize that I was too close to effectively hit him with the weapon that I had.  Same thing happened when I opened the iris to the Common Area and started fighting the animals in there. 

A little later in the game, you can see the guy in the Drive Room and the beastie in the Air/Raft Berth are still whole, while there has been a lot of action in the corridor between the staterooms and into the Common Area.  The counters that are upside down show the unconscious animals and crew members.  I think, crewman C had escaped the corridor and closed the iris valve, unfortunately sacrificing one of the two crewmen in the corridor. 

In the end, I had one crewman dead, one unconscious, one wounded and one unwounded, while he had two animals dead outright and four unconscious, which I was able to finish off at my leisure.  It was a fun little game and the boy enjoyed it.  His first question after the game was, "Now can we play Traveller?"  I am afraid that will have to wait for another day, but I'm thinking of ways to cut it down to a 7- and 10-year-old's level so the kids will enjoy it and want to play it over time, growing with the game so to speak.  I'm sure he will keep bugging me about it until we do play it.

More Family Time

So, as you know, I've been a couple of weeks late in reporting my gaming.  Something that I have finally been able to remedy this week.  First of all, here is the reason that I was unable to report at least one of the games earlier:

This is me (in the BCGs) and two of my guys on top of the 'hill' that took us two and a half hours to climb.  This was when we were about to descend it after a 28-hour mission (that unbeknownst to us was about to turn into a 36-hour mission and which followed a 24-hour mission with a 2 hour 'break' in between) - thus the joyful looks on our faces. 

I do have to admit that we at least had some nice scenery to enjoy while feeling like a rewarmed pile of miserable doggie doo-doo. 

And the week did start with a 20-minute 'insertion' by Black Hawk. 

Funnily enough, I was not told we were being 'inserted' prior to the flight so it came as something of a surprise when I was told to determine my location and call in the 8-digit grid for a pickup.  Instead we just told them we were at the village and ready to be picked up, but then got lucky when a passing motorist on a different mission gave us a ride back to base. 

The week after that, I traveled across the country to attend a class then returned home.  The class was held on a joint Army-Air Guard post and I never bothered to venture onto the Air side of it, but passing the Air side on the outside, there is a B-29 sitting near the gate.  Next time I'm there, I'll have to take a pic to add to my collection.  So that was part of my big adventure and why I was unable to post at least of my game reports on time.  But enough of that.  The real reason I was posting here today was to tell about some more family gaming. 

The day after I got back (late Friday night - so on Saturday), my 6-year-old wanted to play a game.  When I asked him what he wanted to play, he said, "Robo Rally!"  Really?  We had tried playing it once before and decided it was beyond both the 6- and the 9-year-old (perhaps a year or so younger at the time), but my wife and I both love it.  Well, I thought, we'll see how long this goes on.  I pulled out the game and set up a simple 3-point race covering  two boards.  I also modified it so that instead of laying out all five segments (a difficult concept for a 6-year-old brain to keep track of) I let him play his cards one at a time, based on the results of his previous move.  The result?  The little bugger almost beat me!  I got to the final flag one segment ahead of him!  He was then enamored with the game and spent the next two days laying out impossibly difficult courses.  We tried to actually play one of them and several hours later we still weren't done.  He eventually put the game away on his own initiative admitting that he needed the table space for a game of Milton Bradley's The Lost World: Jurassic Park with the daytime kid-sitter. 

So, as pleasant as that turned out, even more heart-warming was my 9-year-old daughter asking me that same evening if she could go to game night with me.  You see, she had had a sleepover spa party with several of her friends the night I got home (it was actually for her birthday, which isn't until August, but one of her bestest friends is moving tomorrow and she wanted to make sure the girl was included) and was so wiped out, she spent most of Saturday afternoon asleep.  When bedtime rolled around she was wide awake.  I recognized this dilemma and consented to taking her to game night with me. 

At game night, there were only five of us, including her, and we ended up playing Risk - one of two choices that were decided upon prior to us arriving.  This was her first experience playing Risk.  She had decided a few weeks previously that she didn't want to play it with her brother and me.  She ended up doing all right and holding her own for most of the game.  Unfortunately, she was strongest in North America (which wouldn't have been a bad choice for a base) and Asia (which, as everyone knows, is almost impossible to hold early in the game).  She tried to reinforce everything evenly across the board and ended up thrown out of North America (by a sixty-something-year-old man who found it appropriate to taunt a 9-year-old girl when he beat her by the luck of the dice).  She and I were peaceably cohabitating in Asia for the moment so I built up my forces and quietly trashed North America via Alaska.  The boob sat there dumbfounded as his superiority failed him and he lost all but one possession.  Doug, bless his soul, knocked out the last possession in his turn immediately following mine. 

Anyway, we ended up calling the game a few turns later as we were playing on the porch and she was both chilly and finally feeling the effects of tiredness.  Looking at the board, we proclaimed Perry victor (his base was Africa and he had just taken South America from Doug, had a solid presence in Europe and was holding firm to the Middle East; while I held Australia and roughly half of Asia, Doug having thrown me out of North America in turn).  Fortunately she enjoyed the game time with daddy and his friends (the second or third time she's played with us). 

So, the point is two new gaming experiences resulted in positive results for the kids and a lot of fun.  It won't be long before they are both gaming more hard-core games.  Unfortunately, I didn't get any pictures of either of the games described above, but I assure you they were as described.  I don't know when I'll have another battle report - I'm training for a new job and they're working me nearly 60 hours a week for the next couple of weeks and at the same time, I'm supposed to start some extensive on-line military training.  At any rate, Happy Gaming and I'll see you around the table.

Space - the Final Frontier

So last night we did our first space ship fight using Full Thrust.  I've read the rules a couple of times and liked them for their simplicity without being beer and pretzels.  We've all played Star Fleet Battles and various other space battle games - in fact, we played a (for me) big game of SFB last week with four Romulans vs. four Feds.  I've never seen a Fed Command Cruiser explode with one shot before.  Now I have.  But I digress. 

I just couldn't take the taunting that I perceived everytime I looked at GZG's webstore.  "Buy us!" they said.  "Buy us!"  Both the space ships and the 15s.  So I did.  I got the two fleet starter set and two packs of 15s.  Total came to about $60 with postage, which isn't bad considering they had to ship from England to the U.S., which is usually quite expensive. 

Anyway, I painted up the ships - took about 3 or 4 hours to clean, assemble, prime and paint up the 16 ships between the two sets.  In each starter set you get a battlecruiser, a heavy cruiser, two light cruisers, two destroyers and two frigates.  These ships are about an inch long (the frigates) to about three inches long (the battlecruisers).  We used the six smaller ships in each set for our battle.

Two UNSC frigates and a destroyer.  ESU ships are in the

background. 

 

The pictures are a bit dark because we were playing at night on Doug's front porch.  Should be a good effect for a space game, though! 

 

The ESU destroyers with the light cruisers in the top left

background.

 

The ESU closed the gap quickly and while several of their ships took hits on the first turn of contact, they focused on one UNSC destroyer and wiped it off the map.  In the second turn of combat, the same things happened.  But then the tide started to turn and the damage caught up to them.  Very rapidly

 

A strange picture.  The ships have crossed each other's

battle line and are turning back on each other.  The four-

sided die on the ESU light cruiser is simply to identify it. 

 

ESU frigates running between UNSC light cruisers.

 

A UNSC light cruiser takes on an ESU light cruiser and

two destroyers.  The play aids are my own creation.

 

While the UNSC took the big hits early, the damage creeping up on the the ESU and the UNSC's superior weapons quickly caught up.  At the end of the game, the UNSC had one light cruiser and one frigate with relatively no damage, and one frigate with pretty severe damage left versus an ESU light cruiser and a destroyer, both pretty well mauled.  In fact, I can't remember now, but the second light cruiser might have been taken out on the last turn of the game, too.  The game was five or six turns long and lasted about two hours - maybe a little less. 

 

I'm very pleased with the way the ESU paint job turned out.

This is the light cruiser, one of my favorite ships of the 

fleet - the other is the ESU battlecruiser.

 

I made the play aids by photocopying the fire arc diagram from the FT Light rules, then enlarging it so that the base fit inside the inner ring.  I copied it onto cardstock and laminated it for a little durability.  It actually came in very handy during the game - for turning especially - though a few of the ships still got off on some wonky courses.  There were a couple of cases where the firing arc diagram also helped us to judge if a ship was in the arc or not so I thought it worked out well. 

 

Everyone enjoyed the game and the rules.  We had a couple of questions that we were able to generally resolve pretty easily.  One element that Doug commented on particularly was the movement.  He appreciated the way you had to use thrust to speed up, slow down and turn.  We all agreed using vector movement probably wouldn't add much to the game while slowing it down appreciably.  I like the damage rules.  Most of the ships in the game died before they became crippled via the threshold rule, but a few still ended up pretty disabled.  All of them had some kind of damage at the end of the game. 

 

We all agreed that this is a great set of rules and everyone is thinking about which fleet to invest in themselves.  I'm looking forward to getting some more ships and expanding the games and rules we use.  As you can tell, I can't say enough good stuff about this game, the models, and the manufacturer support.