Star Wars Risk (really)

Last fall, I bought a copy of the 2015 game Star Wars Risk entirely because it had a tonne of tiny space ships. I was just going to cage them for painting and toss the game but I read the rules first and it is actually pretty decent (and good for a Risk variant) so I added a few more minis and have been running a few games.

The game board is shaped like Darth Vader's tie-fighter silhouette, has three play spaces (left, right and centre), and lets you fight out the Battle Endor. Action is card driven, which lends a bit of interest and fog of war. Basically, the Space Vietcong have to destroy the Death Star before the Space Americans/Nazis wipe out the Rebel fleet.

The central area sees fighters contest for control of space around the fully operational Death Star while they wait for the ground forces to fight it out and lower the shields (I added minis for the larger ships and the DS). This shot is at the end of a game where the forces are pretty severely depleted and the Empire has managed to wipe out the Rebel fleet before the Death Star was destroyed. In each of the five games I've played, the game came down to the wire so it is well balanced and I don't see any killer strategies you could employ..

The ground game (above) sees the Rebel commandos move closer to the shield generators, slowed but not stopped by the Empire. The game comes with cardboard counters but I had some 15mm troops that I painted and added for colour. The tension here is how many cards does the Empire waste to slow the Rebels? Once the shields are down, the Death Star is very vulnerable.

On the other side of the board is a throne-room duel between Luke, Vader and the Emperor. Again, cardboard counters were replaced with some extra 25mm WEG metals from the 1980s. This duel is very much a sideshow and is less integrated into game play than the shield generator track. It has some nice colour (do you redeem Vader or just kill him--depends on your cards and your planning).

Overall, for a game that is designed for 10-year-olds (and requires no reading to play), it was a hoot. You can easily learn the game and play twice in an hour if you are an experienced gamer. I wouldn't want to play this very often but, as something to have around to haul out and play with non-gamers who like Star Wars, this was way better than expected.

Battlefront Valkyrie

I've watched the guys at the club play Battlefront Valkyrie a couple of times. This is a cool, printable game which seem to foreshadow the likely direction of gaming: buy your pdfs and stls and away you go. Basically, it is a streamlined, off-brand Star Fleet Battles.

The pros are super-slick energy allocation and combat system, all managed on ship cards. This is very, very well designed.

The cons are the initiative and more mechanics are fiddly and confusing in practice and don't seem to follow Newtonian physics (i.e., don't power your engine and your ship stops?!? what?).

Bruce fixed the by adding some pre-plotting of moves (retention of momentum, accelerate or decelerate, turns) which allows for simultaneous action. The result is a very slick game and a chance to pull out his 1/7000 fleets.

Would definitely play again and probably my favourite ship-level game at this point. You can reasonably play three ships (so a small squadron) and still face incredibly difficult choices.

Would definitely play again!

Some gaming updates

So last fall, Bruce suggested we pool a list of games we wanted to play again and then work our way through them. There are about 20 games on the list with the sequence being randomly generated.

First up was Struggle for Europe, a reskinning of Lincoln (which I don't think we've played) by Worthington Games. This game focuses on WW2 in Europe and offers one of the best games at this scale that I have played. There are relatively few counters, only 30-some areas, with point-to-point movement and the game uses cards to drive play. There are three decks (representing the three phases of the war), the game ends when one player has exhausted all of their cards (which creates major opportunity costs plus creates a tactical "attrition" option for players), and you win by controlling key locations. 

The strategy for the Germans is to either win early or try to hold on and preclude an allied victory before the cards runs out. I think this is the third time we've played this and every game is a nail biter. This one ended up in a German victory just as the US was invading France (some luck in the desert and at Leningrad tipped it--otherwise, Germany was spent). 

Next up was Sam Mustafa's Longstreet. Other than the Union won, I don't recall much of the details of this ACW skirmish. This is another card-driven game at the brigade level. A few years ago, we played through the full campaign system (which sees the cards and armies change over the course of the war). This is a good game to be the defender in!

Then we played Sam Mustafa's Nimitz. We've done a couple of WW2 games of this but Bruce had bought some pre-Dreadnaught minis so we refought a break-out action in the Philippines between the US and German fleets (I think). Overall, this is a pretty solid game. Sometimes the amount of effort to resolve shooting seemed tedious but, if that were streamlined, there wouldn't be much left.

We then played the same scenario using the 1980s rules Fire When Ready on a hex grid. It was a messier game (no formations required) with preplotting and (I think) simultaneous movement. Not a bad game. Nimitz feels more modern in terms of gaming conventions and mechanics, though. I think the scenarios split one win for each side.

We continued with the naval theme using Mustafa's Halsey rules (basically a map game) of a British convoy run through the Mediterranean during WW2. This is a very solid game and was, I thought, much more interesting than Nimitz in terms of the decisions (I tend to prefer high-level games, I think). 

Once the fleets come to grips, the game has a small battle board mechanic. In the end, the Germans won on points (I could not roll worth crap that night). Overall, pretty fun and the use of blinds created enough fog of war on a shared board to make decisions tough.

We wrapped up the autumn gaming with Taskforce, a cold-war naval game with double blind movement set in North Atlantic. We played duelling convoy runs with surface and submarines (no fixed wing air to simplify the rules a bit). The author is better known for the Victory Games 6th/7th/2nd Fleet series that came out about 10 years later.

There is a bit of fiddly searching (such is double blind without an umpire) but that got easier after a couple of turns. Once there is contact, you switch to a battle board to resolve air, missile, torpedo and gunnery attacks, which is kind of cool. I don't recall who won (it was close). 

There were some interesting battles: a Soviet convoy getting stalked and repeatedly attacked by NATO frigates using guns (having used their SSMs to take out the escorts) and a NATO convoy being stalked and repeatedly attack by Soviet subs and surface ships. This created quite a lot of tension.

For a 45-year-old game, this was surprisingly good and the multi-step battle board gave an interesting feel. Your SSMs, for example, come in, face area AA, then jamming, then close AA, then they strike (or not...). You can decide how many missile from each volley drop at pickets and how many continue into the main fleet (which means being subjected to a second set of defences).

Xenos Rampant Tiny Trek

Over the past few months, Bruce and I have been fine-tuning Xenos Rampant to give a good fleet-level spaceship game. The link above gives you the basic rules. A few weeks back, we played a three-player, 50-point ST:DS9 Federation versus Klingon.

The Klingons had to attack and destroy a space station with two separate commands. The Federation had to defend the station and had a relief force in addition to the station itself (which we played as a single command). 

he unit stats and orbat are all at the bottom of this post. The hexes on the mat have no game meaning. The Klingons come on from the right side in the picture above. The Federation relief force comes on from an adjacent edge (as shown above), which creates an interesting tactical situation.

I've played the scenario twice and it is very tight. Bruce and Nathan drew the two Klingon commands and their strategy was to rush the big ships at the station while using the smaller Klingon ships to tie up the relief force. An alternative strategy is to beat the hell out of the relief force and then go after the station. We passed a pewter Sisko back and forth to track who had initiative ("who has the Sisko?").

The battle basically had three components In the middle, the USSs Janet Jackson, Tiffany, and Robin Sparkles tangled with the KSSs Megadeath, Motley Crue, and Queensryche. This was mostly a drawn. The Robin Sparkles got beat up pretty bad but the Motley Crue and Queeenryche were run off.

On the left, the KSS Scorpion focused its attack on Deep Space 3 (oddly, I have no pictures). Eventually, the Scorpion was able to cause enough damage that the Space Station started failing courage checks. Thus led to run-away systems failures, and it eventually bit it just a turn before the Federation was likely to break the Klingons

Meanwhile, on the right, the USSs Debbie Gibbon and Alanis closed with the KSSs Iron Maiden, Slayer, and Korn. The Korn was eventually able to slip past and attack the Federation heavies from behind but the Slayer and Iron Maiden got the crap beat out of them in close combat.

Overall a fun game and the rules adaptation seems to work fine. We experimented with allowing ships to slip up to 45 degrees off centre for free in this game. That worked fine and (or but, depending on your tastes) it made movement very fluid (versus only straight forward flight with a penalty for turning). Meh, either way was fine.

The Klingons had three fighter units and the Federation space stations had five fighters. I had to proxy in some vipers and raiders (hoots of derision) since I haven't based the ST:DS9 fighter tokens.

Cheap-o space terrain

A few weeks back, I was doing some outer-space gaming and realized my printed planets looked a bit lame. Bruce suggested I get some styrofoam balls, cut them in half, and paint them up. 

For a $5 project, I think it turned out pretty good. The scale is a bit wonky and all but that is the nature of space (it is big) and my gaming table (it is small). I have bunch more balls to paint up so I may experiment with painting in a "night" side on the planets. I also needed some asteroids/small moons.

So I took some small balls and applied spray paint to melt them (outdoors, obvs). The resulting crater effect painted up well enough.

I wonder if a bunch of pea gravel laid on the mat in a drift would be more pleasing. Bruce suggested putting a piece of black felt underneath to denote the asteroid field's area.

I also melted a larger ball as a destroyed planet or proto-planet or whatever. Again, a super easy "nothing" project.

Up next: Ideally some Crimean cavalry.

Fine-tuning Fleet-level Starship Combat using Xenos Rampant

I hauled my tiny starships over to Bruce's place last week and we gave the adaptation of Xenos Rampant to fleet-level action (i.e., the player is an admiral commanding multiple ships) two good playlists. We made a couple of adjustments between tests and the result seems to give a good game. Scenario was convoy escort: Galactica versus Star Fleet. The ships are 1/10,000ish scale from the National Cheese Emporium on Shapeways.

We retained two types of units: capital ships and fighters. Capital ships:

• always have movement as their automatic action
• move straight forward; a turn of up to 90 degrees costs 2" of movement
• act like vehicles, meaning they can try to shoot after moving at a -1 to their activation roll 
• have a forward shooting arc of 180 degrees (we ignore arcs during assault)
• have -1 to armour when shoot at from behind their front edge.

This seems to approximate momentum in movement (and reduces dice rolling around movement) while giving players tough choices about the sequence of actions you decide to take (do you move everyone or do you automatic move one ship and then risk a shooting attempt?).

By contrast, fighters:

• have no facing, can turn freely during a move, and always turn to face an attacker
• can neither shoot nor be shot at 
• fly back towards their carriers when they fail a courage test and, once they touch a carrier, automatically rally during the next rally phase
• that touch a carrier (because of a failed courage test or voluntarily) also regain 1d6 strength points
• can launch as a part of move action simply by moving away from the carrier.  

This seems to approximate carrier operations with fighter being brittle, close-in combat units that can re-arm by returning to base. We also had asteroid fields and planets to block LOS. You can move through an asteroid field at no additional cost but take a 10d6 attack.

Our playtest pitted two battlestars, six transports, and 10 viper squadrons against two battleships, two cruisers, two light cruisers, a destroyer and two frigates. This worked out to 50ish points per side. If you wanted to split this up into two commands for each side (each of which must fail for a player to lose initiative), you could.

Our experience was that the battlestars were very tough ships but one had to be careful with the viper wings and think about whether to re-arm or attack very carefully. The battlestars were also vulnerable to being flanked and were a pain to get turned around and back in the fight if they failed a courage test. Not allowing fighters to shoot seems to mimic the role of fighters in BSG and Star Wars: get in close and try to get lucky while taking significant casualties.

The Federation fleet was also tricky to handle. The destroyer and frigate flotillas were very fast (faster than the fighters) but also brittle, so they were useful to threaten and pin down other ships more so than in combat. The larger federation ships were slow and the cruisers got beat-up quickly. But, with careful maneuvering, even the light cruiser could really put a pasting on an enemy ship.

Overall, this felt like a very fleet-level action (you were commanding multiple ships rather than fiddling with energy allocation on one ship). I have out the ship stats below. But, before turning to that, Bruce also showed off his own 1/6000-sca;e WW2 fleets that we've been using with Nimitz. The counters that the ships sit in are about two inches long. The models can we swapped into other counters as needed.

These are the SSDs we used for the Federation and Colonial Fleets. If you want these as Word files, I can email them to you.

Since the rules basically seem to work, I will point up a Klingon and Cylon fleet. Bruce also had a good idea for handling space stations so maybe we'll try that next.

Xenos Rampant Outerspace

Bruce and I were speculating about whether Xenos Rampant could be adapted to starship combat. We had a nasty bout of wildfire smoke 10 days ago (it was an 11+ on a scale of 1-10 and you could see about five blocks). Since I wasn't up to to roll 3d6 against my constitution, I decided to see if I could work out an adaptation.

I have been itching to use some tiny (1:10,000 scale) models from Shapeways. To give you a sense of how small, the d6 has 1cm sides. The Galactica is supposed to be 1.5ish km long and that makes almost three times also long as the Enterprise D.

Anyhow, I pulled out two 50-point fleets. The stats (which I'll post later when they are refined) were based on infantry units. the Galactica was an elite unit with a bunch of upgrades to make it worth 12 points plus the cost of the fights (5 squadrons at 2 points each). These are enormous ships and let me test out fighter rules as well as min-max ships.

Fleet 1 was the Galactica, a ragtag fugitive fleet, plus the (not-pictured) Pegasus as a separate command. I didn't bother with a spacemat since the dining room table was dark wood. So you'll have the pardon the grainy pictures (that pun was for Terry). 

They were pitted against the ST:DS9 era ships. Yes, I know this makes zero sense, but it let me point out a ST:DS9 fleet (I also have Klingon, Dominion and Cardassian fleets) and test a more traditional space navy with big and small ships.

 

The basic rules adaptations were pretty minimal. There are two classes of ships (capital and fighters).

• Capital ships shoot in the front 180 degrees. Turning up to 90 degrees costs 2 inches of movement. Armour is -1 from the side or rear (if shot is from behind from base edge). The armour reduction encouraged maneuver. Most capital ships move automatically straight forward but have to dice to shoot or assault (the Battlestar's reversed this). Every unit has the firefight skill.
• Fighter have no facing, can turn freely during a move and always turn to face an attacker. They can neither shoot nor be shot at (they are basically melee units). Their armour was 1 but they had extra strength points (basically they were rabble). 
• If fighters fail a courage test (and they will), they fly back towards their carriers. Once they touch the carrier, they automatically rally and regain 1d6 strength points. Launching is just a part of their next move action. They can also voluntarily land and regain strength. This creates a sense of carrier operations without much bookkeeping.

Anyhow, I did two playtests. The first one was a romp for the Colonials, so I rejigged the fighter stats and also developed a better strategy for the Federation. Game 2 playd out like this. 

There were three Federation commands: a heavy group (1 BB and 2 CCs), a cruiser screen (4 CLs), and a flotilla of smaller, fast craft (2 DDs and 2 FGs). The two big units moved to take on the two Battlestars while the flotilla tried to draw off some vipers and then loop around to attack the transports. Below you can see the flotilla at the top streaking past the Galactica and its fighters.

Meanwhile, most of the vipers focusd on attriting the light cruiser screen while Pegasus and Galactica exchanged volleys at range with the larger Federation ships. Below, you can see a less than stellar effort by the Pegasus.

Eventually, the Galactica started to take some serious damaging (having had to turn to protect the fleet). But the continuous cycling of the vipers had run off most of the cruiser screen. 

The flotilla chased the fleet, but the fleet fought them off at short range. The Federation large ships easily brushed aside the viper attacks (although there were some failed courage tests) but the Feds were just no match for the two Battlestars firing.

In the end, a Colonial victory. Some better tactics by the Federation would have likely turned the battle. The Galactica was close to destruction and was a missed opportunity by the Federation. I hope to give this a playtest with Bruce soon. In the meantime, I'll give some thought about how to deal with super large ships and space stations (cube below is to scale).

I'm continually surprised how adaptable these rules are to different genres of sci-fi gaming. I wonder if they would work for superheroes?