Sunday, February 5, 2012

Blasters and Bulkheads Game 3 - Raid on the Rabid

Hmmm, this took longer than I had planned, but I have a couple of back to back blog updates that have been sitting on my camera for over a month. January is a busy month for travel for me in the real world, so the last few weeks of not much happening in terms of painting etc. wasn't surprising, but this game of Blasters & Bulkheads is from early in the new year.

As you'll recall, in the first game Chewbacca was a casualty and captured by the Imps. In the second game, the rebels successfully captured documents telling them where Chewbacca was being held. So in this third game two task forces, one under Luke, one under Han, raided the Imperial frigate the Rabid to rescue Chewie.

The ship tiles are from Fat Dragon, and most of the 3D props are too, though some are from WorldWorks and others from Micro Tactix. One of my goals in this game was to try out the Essence (aka Force) rules, using Luke. I also gave the rebels a randomly determined secondary goal of having R2D2 download data from one of the computer terminals throughout the ship. Other possible secondary missions included rescuing the other prisoner, capturing an officer, stealing a shuttle, and disabling the engines.

This first pic is from the end of the first turn, the rebels have entered the Rabid at two (randomly determined) points, on the left is Team Skywalker, working towards the engine room, on the right is Team Solo, working towards the prison cells. The Imperial patrols' direction had been randomly determined, and they were programmed to move in that direction until an alert had been given.


A close-up of Team Skywalker - Luke, R2D2, C3PO, another wookie, and a team of troopers:
Team Solo - Han, Leia, and a team of commandos:
By the end of the second turn both rebel teams have been spotted, and the rebel troopers have been whittled down in Team Skywalker. Han did a good job wiping out most of the Imperial naval troopers guarding the bridge, but there are a team of stormtroopers still coming up behind them and cutting off Leia.

At the end of turn 3, things are getting worse for the rebels. The stormtroopers won their showdown with the rebel commandos, and two patrolling stormtrooper NCO's finished off the rebel troopers in Team Skywalker. Somehow the wookie in Team Skywalker was unable to do anything to a simple naval tech in hand to hand combat!

Things are pretty much done for the rebels now, despite Han wiping out another naval patrol. The wookie is down, and R2 and C3PO have retreated back to their ships, and Luke is just finishing off his combat before retreating too.
So the rebels are in deep trouble now, the heroes barely got off ship before it entered hyperspace, and Chewie is still a prisoner.

I think I made a few mistakes in setting the game up. Because I hadn't statted up individual stormtroopers, the stormtrooper patrol consisted of two NCO's, who are better quality than typical stormtroopers should be. The techs in engineering were in the same boat, they should have been done up as henchmen. The end result was there were way too many Fate Dice in play for the Imperials.

I haven't figured out what my next game will be, I'm moving towards playing some Songs of Blades & Heroes fantasy next, and need to spend some time building some more cardboard terrain. But somehow, Chewbacca must be rescued!

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