What a piece of junk! (or...Han Solo was right)

 With Friday nights fast becoming 'X-Wing Evenings', it's time for another 'buying expensive licensedTM pre-paintedTM miniatures and playing with glossy rules style-ee' post.

Now here, we see the introduction of the tramp freighter otherwise known as the Millenium Falcon. Crappy defence but lots of 360 degree attacks.


There seem to be two options.

Part the first...The Direct Approach (also known as suicide)

a) Fly straight at the enemy TIE fighters

b) ...while the X-Wings do the same (see the 'speed blurs' for the TIES in this pic - I meant to do that of course)

c) Get swarmed and die

d) sit beside the coffee in the 'graveyard of ships)

Part the second...the Feint (also known as the 'Han Solo Death Star Chicken sh1t Gamble')

Now the key here is to do what Han Solo did...


 a) Sort of pretend to get involved

b) Fly away..far away and say things like...'I'm not getting involved in your pesky (and particularly well financed...have I mentioned this before?) rebellion. Fly around the periphery a lot and take the odd long range shot.

Slight issue here is that the X-Wings get badly shot up and your fellow player goes ballistic (sorry Steve)

c) Then return as the all conquering hero to mop up, when there's a single X-Wing left and you have so many shields and hits that you are the equivalent of an M1 Abrams...

See? Exactly what Han Solo did during the Death Star attack. Let everybody else kill themselves and then just turn up out of nowhere and say 'you're all clear kid. Let's blow this thing so we can all go home!' (Did he really say that? Isn't that kind of...never mind...)

What good are snub fighters going to be against that?

A little late to the party I know, but last night’s game with the ‘Friday Night Phalanx’ was the now famous ‘X-Wing’.

An excellent game as it turned out, with a thorough and yet elegant system, which is easy to pick up and runs the gamut from calculated tactical play - where you are trying to second guess your opponent(s) - right through to more random unplanned events, which keeps things exciting.

Real bonuses include :

(1)    Components – painted, highly detailed, and assembled to present information and incorporate all tactical information on the stand or card.

(2)    It’s the original trilogy.

(3)    Beautifully integrated dice mechanics and card mechanisms which give a real feel for how we imagine starship combat would be and how we remember Star Wars and Empire in our heads.

(4)    It’s the original trilogy.

(5)    It evokes a real sense of the movies. We were constantly quoting lines from the films (stay on target) as X-Wings swooped in for the kill or TIE fighters massed to swarm an unsuspecting (but apparently well funded) rebel ship. Oh yes, and only Steve can do an accurate TIE fighter ‘screech’.

(6)    Have I mentioned it’s the original trilogy?

• Movement mechanics operate off templates, the more complex of which can ‘distress’ ship/pilot and dictate recovery.
• Dice/combat gives varying results, resulting in ‘ooohs’ and ‘aaahs’ as unexpected critical hits do untold damage to …attack plans!
• Everything looks really good, and despite scale or range compensation vs model size, it’s not something that gets in the way as it might say with wargame rules. In fact, I didn’t even think about the scaling until well after the game.

We actually were able to play two games in a 3.5 hour window, which is excellent for 4 players.

Pics are a little intense as my hand was shaking with excitement ;) …

 Game 1: SCREEEEEEEEE!

 

The TIEs take on two X-Wings. It won't be an easy fight; the TIEs have no shields and are basically a bloke in a vac suit with an engine strapped to him (oh yes, and solar panels for some reason).

 A black hole appears...and it's full of crisps (potato chips for our American viewers).

 The action begins. X-Wings are robust, with shields, so if they can take down some TIE Fighters quickly, they can take the initiative.

In the end however, after taking out one X-Wing, the remaining TIEs are able to swarm the lone rebel.

Game 2: 4 TIEs and one TIE Advanced vs an A, X and Y wing.

The pesky A wing gets busy right away, darting around like a colonial Viper (oops, wrong intellectual property)

The Advanced and his wingman take on the tank like Y-Wing, with its 5 hits. (It's Shermans vs Tiger)

With the X-Wing gone in a freak strike, the rebels have to rely on the robust Y and the agile A

 ...but the Y can only take so much punishment...

 ...before all attention turns to the A. 'Here they come.'

 Bad dice rolls for the A Wing, as its hopes of at least taking out the Advanced are dashed, and it succumbs to numbers.

 

 ***

 

A lot more to come of this one then with some larger games and potentially a campaign of sorts with rebels trying to destroy imperial prototypes, Imperials trying to find the rebel base and…ahem…an apparently ragtag band of so called ‘rebels’ (who appear to be quite well funded I might add) using hit and run tactics and deceit to provoke unwarranted attacks against the just, yet wholly misunderstood, Imperial authority in the galaxy.

All we are trying to do is end this destructive conflict...and bring order to the galaxy.

Where’s that damned planet killer? We should get a name for it…You know? The big, grey, dangerous, death globe star thing…That’s it! We should call it, the ‘Dangerous Globe’!

DON'T PANIC ! (part ...the second)

As posted previously,  I like to scare the living daylights out of myself by actually posting the state of the nation , errr painting table.

Now, this innocent little picture shows:

(1) the number of projects that have been, started...but not as Magnus would have said, actually finished.
(2) projects which seemed shiny at the time time but never got off the ground
(3) random regiments which need to be finished for a larger game, but of course distraction prevails.

The guilty parties include :
a) Axles and Alloys 'Battlecar' style conversions with matchbox cars and weapons of various scales http://axlesalloys2.blogspot.co.uk/
b) a regiment of late seventeenth century French dragoons
c) a 1/72 scale 1970s Chieftain tank and a large 'toy' scale M1 Abrams
d) 1/32 Airfix US Infantry undergoing conversion with Garands in place of carbines (scalpel and finger cut issues there)
e) a 25mm scale Dixon woodland indian (perched atop Chieftain)
f) 2No homecast Prince August knights

No wonder I never get anything actually done!

Game 18 - First Bull Run, July 1861

The 'Battle Cry' rules, when first published, were a precursor to the now (in)famous Command and Colours and Battlelore rules. Richard Borg's genius here was to find a crossover between hex and chit based wargame and the command / resource management of card driven systems, which emulated the fog of war for horse and musket, and ultimately ancients/medieval/sword & sorcery.

There's no denying that (1) the system is very different in terms of command decisions when compared with 'traditional' wargames rules and (2) it gives a quick game.

With time pressures prevalent for us both in the last weeks, a quick game was the order of the day, but no less demanding and exciting for that.

Ok, so the Battle Cry system is probably not for those who want to see an exact Order of Battle. For us, that was less important here. The big eyeopener though, for at least one of us who has played a lot of Battlelore, was that there is significant mileage to use the precepts and rulings for other periods for a fast set-up, fast play game.

Nicely ordered Union battlelines, which, with the unique card system's ability to focus the player's mind on the flanks for many turns, took a while to get moving.

...hiding behind the ridge line, the rebs.

A little cavalry action on the Union right saw significant casualties.

 ...and rebs taking to the woods.

Eventually, the Union centre, taking advantage of Confederate focus on the right and left, begins to move toward the heights.

Effectively pinning the Confederate centre, heavy battles of attrition on the flanks (and a few bad dice rolls) would wear down the rebel infantry.

The ability to 'battle back' is not so prevalent as we see in other versions of the game, but when it happens (card driven in this instance), it can change the face of battle. In this case, Union assaults on the central ridge line are ineffective.

In the end though, gains on the flanks allowed a desperate Union cavalry charge - just enough to destroy the sixth Confederate unit and win the game.

A nicely constructed set of rules for a quick game. Again, as with so many rulesets that we have tried recently, thoughts turn to hacking the rules and card system for other periods. Even seventeenth century Ireland might work here. There are enough event driven twists and turns to make it function as a game perhaps. We shall see...