This past Saturday I went to our local gaming mini-convention, Mayday, again. This time the event had rather fewer people than past years due to some other gaming tournaments happening at the same time. However, there was still plenty of fun to be had.
I ran a skirmish game using the Strange Aeons ruleset, but playing out scenarios based the X-Com computer game. (Both old and new). The Strange Aeons base game is a great Lovecraftian adventure ruleset, but my adaptation followed the X-Com plotline, with near-future soldiers fighting invading aliens.
I had two 2 X 3 ft. boards set up, one a rural UFO crash site, the other an urban roadside scene. In both cases the human and alien players were simply trying to wipe each other out.
The miniatures I used for snakemen (old X-Com game) were from Critical Mass Games. These are supposed to be 15mm aliens, but they fit quite well with my 1/72 scale ultra-modern special forces soldiers.
On the first level, the human player had a lot of trouble advancing against the snakemen's withering plasma fire. He did poorly in all his cover save rolls, and ended up losing all his men to major injuries.
On the urban map, he tried to take advantage of cover by moving from car to car, and sending some of his men, including a sniper, to the top of the convenience store to get a good field of fire. But again, the alien plasma weapons proved to be too deadly for the rifle-armed humans.
Despite the one-sidedness of the game, both players had a lot of fun, and I think the rules generally work quite well. Maybe I need to increase the cover save amount to give the initial tech level humans a chance. I'm thinking of running a campaign for Tuesday nights, since that's where the SA ruleset really shines, at allowing the player to keep a squad of humans through multiple missions gaining experience and abilities.
There were quite a few other games and displays running at the same time. Here, Dave was running his Carpi campaign with late Western Romans using the Hail Caesar ruleset. It looked very nice.
There were some display tables on the side of the room, including this very nice X-Wing setup.
After my morning game, I participated in a DBA tournament. There were only four participants, and we played three games each. The theme of the tournament was elephants, and each player had to use an army with at least one. I borrowed Dennis' Seleukid army, and faced off Dave's Sassanid Persians in the first game. I lost 4-2, and lost my general in the process.
In the second game, fighting against Dennis' Numidians, I did better, winning 4-2. My scythed chariot was the star player, mowing down one of his light horse and his general.
In the third game, I played Mark from Calgary and his Carthaginians. This map had a lot of terrain, and we both maneuvered quite a bit. The picture shows my pike block trudging around in bad terrain for much of the game. The game ended in my favour with some bad rolls on his part. Overall though, Mark won the tournament with the highest score.
In the evening I played in a Star Wars fleet battles game using old clix miniatures. I didn't know a lot about the ruleset, but it played very smoothly and quickly with a large number of ships. It seemed to be very well suited for the sort of large scale cinematic action a Star Wars game demanded.
All in all, I had a lot of fun again this year, and I hope I can come up with some more interesting ideas for running a game next time.
