Back to X-Com

For this year's Mayday gaming convention, I'm running my Strange Aeons: X-Com game again, this time with slightly different scenarios to make it easier on the human player.

I've painted up some extra miniatures for both the human and alien sides, to make the original scenarios better-balanced.

First up are some Elhiem Figures "armoured fed troopers", used as medium-armoured X-Com operatives. These are incredibly good miniatures that fit well with plastic 1/72 miniatures. Hopefully they are part of a trend popularizing 1/72 scale science fiction.

This is one of the armoured troopers compared to a Caesar ultra modern miniature.  You can see that they fit together perfectly in terms of height and proportions.

Here's the whole gang I painted up.  They can be used as a squad with rifles, a heavy weapon, and a leader with some sort of carbine.

A close-up of the heavy weapons trooper and his loader.

Another comparison shot with a Caesar miniature and the Elhiem carbine trooper.

I'm thinking of using these medium-armoured X-Com troops against the original snakemen, and give them better armour and weapons ratings than the poor initial tech-level humans.

To get a bunch of easier opponents for the humans at early tech levels, I painted up some sectoids. These are Rebel Minis alien grays, and even though they are designed for 15 mm, they can fill in as child-sized aliens for 1/72.  The only modification I did was to add some wrist-mounted plasma pistols since the originals were unarmed.

Here's a comparison shot showing the height of the grays. They look fine as small aliens versus human miniatures.

I'll see if the humans do better this time. The sectoids, just like in the computer game, are significantly weaker than humans and only have plasma pistols. Hopefully this will give the early level humans a fighting chance.

Tuesday Gaming Night

Ever since I bought a smart phone, I started taking pictures of my regular Tuesday night gaming club events.  This is the first time I'm actually posting any pictures from one though.

I went to the April 21st gaming night hoping to have a practice run of my X-Com game for Mayday.  However, it looked like everyone was occupied with a game already, so I just joined an "All Quiet on the Martian Front" game, also being prepped for Mayday.

The game has an excellent sci-fi premise of the Martians from H. G. Wells' "War of the Worlds" coming back for another round during the time of WWI.  The humans have various type of primitive tanks, along with giant "land ironclads", and the Martians have their classic tripods in a variety of flavours.

The scenario we played centered around an American land ironclad getting attacked by a large group of Martians, along with other human reinforcements thrown into the mix.  The land ironclad is a huge resin model that dominated the table.  Unfortunately it didn't hit much due to bad dice rolls.

In this picture a group of rough riders - overly brave motorized chaps - tried to immobilize a Martian tripod with grappling hooks.  They succeeded too!

Here, massed tanks attack tripods on the Martian flank.

The game was extremely colourful, and I can't wait to play it again at Mayday.

There were a few other games running, including Kevin and Elliott playing the new Star Wars Armada game.  It looked really good.  I think Dave was running a DBA game, and there was a CCA game being played too.

Overall, it was a pretty good night.