The War on Christmas

Last Christmas, I started eyeing my daughter's collection of holiday lego for their gaming potential. Over the year, I slowly put together a festive game for the club's last night of the year using Pulp Alley. There were four factions with variously intersecting interests and conflicts. We start with Santa:

Then we turn to his newly unionized elves and their allies.

Of course, Darth Vader makes an appearance.

And finally, some meddling kids from Hogwarts arrive.

Players drew briefing at random and then opened up their bag of troops. Troop placement was blind (which didn't create as much chaos as I thought it might) and we ended up (clockwise from top) Lord Vader, Hermoine, Elves, and Santa) entering on discrete sides.

Vader's force consisted almost entirely of gangs which were quickly thinned out by other players. I'd make the gangs a bit more powerful in future games.

I ended up playing one of the sides and pretending I didn't know the ins and outs. Fortunately, my lousy strategy meant I ended up squandering my troops without accomplishing any of my missions! But I did enjoy running a group of Wobs around the gaming table.

The other players quickly moved to complete minor plot points while avoiding the wandering carollers (who triggered a challenge if you got within 3 inches of them). This also added various hairy allies to their gangs.

The completion of three minor plot points caused the major plot point (an Igloo with the power source inside) to appear in front of Lord Vader.

He and Santa's minions duked it out while Vader set up his run towards the south side of the board. In the south, the elves' new Yeti ally duked it out with the boys of Gryffindor. The Boy Who Could Not be Killed sure managed to get knocked down a lot... .

Vader eventually marshalled up his meat-shields... errr... loyal stormtroopers and ran for it. We called the game as the store was closing and Vader won in points, followed closely by Santa. Scott and I had embarrassingly low point totals that the history books don't record.

Thanks to Terry for the loan of his winter trees and the store for the loan of a winter mat. If I was to do this again, I would reduce the figure count (to maybe five or four units per side) to get the game going faster. I'd also shrink the foot print slightly to 4x4.