The gaming system I chose to use was Colonial Battlefleet by Steel Dreadnought Games. It's a great system that has just enough flexibility to come up with some great ship designs, but not so much that it can easily be broken. I'll get to that in another post.
For now though, here's the recap of the game I ran. The scenario was one I came up with myself. A team of archaeologists in a backwater system found a really old and powerful device. They brought it back to a research station to study and of course, word leaked out. This brings all of our players and their small flotillas onto the gaming board to fight for the artifact.
Because I have so many different fleets, I picked my fleet action scale ships from the Babylon 5, Star Trek, Star Wars, and StarGate SG-1 universes.
The whole collection was painted and ready to go, so I spent a great deal of time designing the fleets and attempting to balance them somewhat. After all, some fleets used fighters while others didn't, some had shields, some had massive armor, some had missiles, etc. And that's probably a whole other blog post, so I won't get into it here.
With all the fleets assembled, let's get to the game! I had three players signed up and despite an amazing looking setup, no one else jumped in. But I had three really excited players, so it worked out just fine. It took about 15 minutes to go over the basic rules and then the game started.
The first couple turned didn't involve much excitement. No one was really in range of each other or the small research station in the middle of the board. It took everyone a little while to get used to the movement system and I think the Klingon player never really got it, but everything still ran quite smoothly.
On turn three, the action really started. The Empire launched a salvo of cluster missiles from the star destroyer, the Klingons tried to shoot the space station and missed, and Starfleet knocked down the shields so they could beam aboard the seven toughest squads of redshirts ever collected in one place. Those marines knocked out almost all of the station security forces and looked ready to grab the artifact.
Turn four saw the Empire launch TIE fighters and bombers which charged off to swarm the Klingon Birds of Prey. Starfleet destroyed one of two Birds of Prey and annihilated the stormtroopers who made it onto the station.
By turn five, the Imperial missiles began hitting targets and took out the last Bird of Prey and a Starfleet light cruiser. The Klingons damaged two Imperial cruisers, boarded the station, and were slaughtered by those utterly fearless Starfleet marines. The marines managed to take out a total of five Klingon squads, three more station security squads, and two more stormtrooper squads.
Turn six proved to be the decisive turn of the game. The swarms of Imperial fighters kept doing damage to the Federation and Klingon ships. But the Klingons blew up one Imperial ship in retaliation and managed to kill the fresh squads of stormtroopers who had just wiped out the toughest redshirts in the galaxy.
With the artifact in their hands, the victorious Klingons beamed back onto a D-7 warbird.
Turn seven was the final turn and the most tense of the game. Everyone knew which ship had the artifact and they were gunning for it. Starfleet moved to cut off the likely escape routes, while the Empire tried to ram the warbird, but missed.
The D-7 then proceeded to speed off in the opposite direction everyone expected while the other Klingon ships provided a screen. Imperial fighters swarmed around the Klingons but couldn't destroy any of them. In their rage, the Imperial star destroyer fired a full salvo of turbolasers at the research station and destroyed it as the Klingons warped away for home.
All the players seemed to enjoy themselves a great deal. They quickly got the hang of the system and I found myself providing assistance less and less as the game went on. The Klingon player did feel he had too many ships to watch out for and he did have the largest fleet with six ships. Fighters proved to be a nuisance to the two Star Trek fleets, both of which fielded none, but they weren't an overwhelming advantage. The big star destroyer seemed almost invulnerable but it didn't have enough weapons to capitalize on this.
I have a few changes to make for the next time I run it, but not many. All the work I put into the designs before the game paid off on the table.
-- Mike, Chicago Skirmish Wargames club member
3 comments:
Interesting, it looked like a fun scenario. What are the spiky things in the second picture? I can't figure them out.
This sounds like a blast. Are the ships statted out as what they really are? Meaning, were TIE fighters really blasting away at Romulans? Because if so, I need to play this asap.
As the guy who ran the game, thanks for the comments. Sean, I think you're talking about my pipe-cleaner missiles. I just took three pipe-cleaners, burned one end with a candle, twisted them together, and glued them onto a base. I still need to paint them a bit, but they look really amazing just the way they are.
Brian, Colonial Battlefleet gives you a whole bunch of options for creating ships, but also limits you to keep the system from being broken. I decided on tech levels for each faction in one go then built each fleet according to a previously designed game system. For Star Trek, I used the old FASA system, for B5 I used Mongoose's A Call To Arms. For Star Wars I came up with my rough approximation of the various ships available and did the same with Stargate. It means they are all balanced in their own particular universe and roughly against each other. Next time out I will customize the fighters a bit more, but that isn't part of the rules so I have to be careful not to break them.
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