Mayday 2017

On Saturday, I went to this year's Mayday convention held here in the Edmonton area. Jonathan, the organizer, found an excellent community center in St. Albert that served as a new location for us, and we managed to gather a decent crowd.

This time, I ran a game of Imperial Skies. This is a steampunk Victorian flying battleships game created by Brigade Models. For the miniatures, rather than Brigade Models products, I used ship models from an unrelated board game called Leviathans, an interesting product that unfortunately didn't do well commercially.

Newcomer (to EWG but not to gaming) Derek and long-time EWG member Dan played my game, which involved German battleships attempting to destroy British forts on Mars. Derek played the British fleet and Dan the German.

Dan sent his German warships on board in several columns, with Derek's smaller British fleet attempting to maneuver and cross the Germans' "T".

Initially, the Germans did some damage to the British fleet, destroying a destroyer and a cruiser that wandered too close to the German columns by themselves, while the British did relatively little damage, mainly owing to Derek's dice initially performing badly. However, Derek finally managed to get his battleship into position, and blasted one of the two German battleships at close range. "Crossing the T" is quite nasty in this game.

The battle descended into a swirling melee where generally the British managed to cross the T more and did more damage over time.

Dan finally got his remaining battleship close to the British forts and demolished one of them. However, the forts were heavily dug-in and proved hard to destroy, while the British blasted the German ships one by one. At the end, we called the game at the time limit and Germans were not getting any farther. Both player enjoyed the game quite a bit though.

Next, I played in Dennis' DBA tournament, where each player had three games against different opponents.

I played using one of Dennis' armies, the Anglo-Irish, against Rob and Don from Calgary, and Dave from right here in Edmonton. Things went poorly for me due to die rolling in the first two games, and I lost them both. However, in the third game, Dave's dice were even worse than mine, and I managed to win. It really reinforced the view that DBA is very dependent on single die rolls, leading to a lot of player frustration.

Later that night, Dennis ran a big-battle DBA game of the Battle of Ilipa, between Romans and Carthaginians. I think I like the big-battle version quite a bit more, since there are more die rolls for PIPs (i.e. action points), and so the game is less dependent on single die rolls. Also, more miniatures are involved and the whole thing looks a lot more like a large battle.

All in all, this was another great Mayday, and I hope we can stay at the new location, which proved to be a very nice one indeed.

Mayday 2016

Yet another year has come and gone, and I went to Mayday 2016 over the weekend. Even though this year had somewhat lower attendance than usual, Mayday has become enough of a fixture that most of the usual suspects were there.

I ran my typical Strange Aeons: X-Com game, with the boards mixed up a little bit from usual to provide some variety. I hosted Wiley and Andy in a couple of introductory games - Andy had been interested in Strange Aeons for a while but had never played my game, whereas Wiley had played once before.

The rural board, which I modified to add a farm house.

The urban board, which is now a UFO crash site.

Here Wiley and Andy were trying to figure out the rules on the urban board.

They ended up winning one game each and had a good time. We talked about possibly running a campaign on normal game nights, which is where the base system really shines.

In the afternoon, I played in a series of DBA games with Dennis. Due to low turnout, we were the only ones in the DBA time slot, originally meant for a British-themed tournament. We went through three games, with me playing an ancient British army and Dennis using a sub-Roman Briton army.

We played through slightly different terrain set-ups using the same armies. Dennis ended up winning 2 to 1 and won the "tournament".

In the evening, Terry hosted several players in a Frostgrave game. Frostgrave seems to be the new thing around here, being a fairly simple skirmish campaign game. A lot of people are building their own warbands, and I'll probably modify my Mordheim warband to add some wizards.

The scenario we played had each of us trying to get our wizard to a fountain in the center of the board, to drink its magical waters. Of course, we had to kill each other (and random monsters) along the way.

We played quite late into the evening, and I ended up winning after killing another wizard, which gave a lot of experience. I really liked the rules, since they're both simple and quite flavourful, with everything you'd want in a fantasy system. Time to dust off my Mordheim stuff!

So another enjoyable Mayday has come and gone, and I can't wait until the next one. Maybe I'll run something other than X-Com...

Mayday 2015

This past weekend, I attended the Mayday gaming convention here in Edmonton again.  This year, due to the lack of conflicting Warmachine tournaments, we had both the Warhammer 40k and the Warmachine crowds, and the community center was packed.

The room was so full of tables that my X-Com game had to be moved outside in the hallway.

I ran the same scenarios from last year, but with some gray aliens (sectoids) filling in as the enemies for the UFO crash site, and humans with medium armour fighting the snakemen in the urban scenario.

I hosted a local player who was also here last year through the urban scenario, and it proved to be a lot easier for the humans this time around. Here is a shot of X-Com troops taking cover behind the convenience store.

Since there was time after the first game, we played through the UFO crash site again. The sectoids were weaker opponents, but this time the humans were not so lucky.

At the end, the humans were wiped out and failed to kill all the aliens at the crash site. Here a sectoid captured the wounded X-Com sniper, probably taking him away for probing...

After my game hosting, I played in a DBA tournament. This year, it was rather sparse since some of the regular DBA players were away at the time. We also used the new 3.0 version of the rules, which took some getting used to.

Later in the day, I played in Terry's "All Quiet on the Martian Front" game, which I play-tested on the previous EWG night. This time around, the Martians (including me) were more aggressive, and tripod casualties were high. In the above picture, you can see one of Terry's flashing fire/smoke markers on a destroyed tripod.

It was another great gaming convention, and I can't wait to try the updated X-Com game at Fallcon this year.

Mayday Again!

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.

Mayday 2013 Events

On this Saturday, I attended Mayday, our annual local gaming convention.  This year, we had quite a turn out, and there were more games than last year.

Various hosts ran individual games, and there were also two big tournaments, for Warhammer 40k and Warmachine.

I ran a Tomorrow's War scenario, where a hi-tech security company has to escort a convoy of important cargo through an area controlled by insurgents.  The asymmetrical game setup of the Ambush Alley game engine allowed an excellent game to be played.

The convoy started at one end of the table and had to reach the other side against opposition.  The enemy could pop up in various hotspots around the table, and outnumbered the smaller but higher-quality security teams.

However, the game went badly for the convoy from the very beginning - one of the vehicles was immobilized, and the other had its weapon destroyed.  From then on, the convoy had serious problems going through the town.

The vehicle that still could move tried to forge ahead, but was demolished by a large IED.  Only the foot security teams could protect the convoy now.

 

The men pushed on though, and managed to cause some casualties to the insurgents due to their high quality.  However, eventually they got beaten back and were overwhelmed by superior numbers.  Here, a shot of one of the last turns had one of the security teams all wounded and captured by the insurgents, while the other one was pinned with casualties.

The game ended with a major victory for the insurgents, and the scenario might need some more balancing.  I'll probably add a sniper team for the security company, to add some firepower and coordinate the beyond line-of-sight fire capability of the vehicles.

There were quite a few other games going at the same time.

Dave C ran an El Cid game using I believe War and Conquest rules.  It sure looked great with crusaders painted up in all their glory.

There was a Victorian Sci-fi game run by the guys from Calgary, and it looked quite fun.  I saw a funny looking steam tank, a dinosaur, and some sort of summoning of a giant spider.

There was of course the 40k tournament, which provided a lot of opportunities for nicely painted models to get shown.

There was also a nicely done WWII game, Command Decision I think.

Later in the day, I played in the DBA tournament, where all of us used armies that were historical enemies of Rome.  I had the ancient Spanish.

The first game, I faced off against the Seleukid army of Don from Calgary.  This was a slow game where we both maneuvered for position most of the time.  We only started engaging near the end of the time limit, and I eked out a win by killing his general from some lucky rolls.

The second game was against Dave's ancient Britons, and I was not so lucky.  The fairly open terrain didn't suit my army, and I deployed poorly, allowing his chariots to smash against a weak flank.  Add some unlucky rolls to that and I suffered several units destroyed, losing the game.

The third game was against Stu's version of the ancient Britons army, and I did better.  I managed to hang onto edges of steeps hills and attacked his army from a location of advantage.   This ended in a win for me.

I think Mark won the tournament at the end, winning all three of his games.

In the evening I played in a 15 mm sci-fi game using the Gruntz rules.  I played aliens trying to attack some human colonists protected by marines.

The aliens started in a power plant and had to attack humans on the other side of the board.

I eventually overwhelmed the marines through relentless alien attacks.  Here is a shot of the aliens breaking into the human settlement.

Gruntz is an interesting game system, where you roll two D6s for each figure, in order to beat a target number to hit and wound the enemy.  It played quite quickly even with a fairly large number of models, so it can be another rule set for me to try out.

All in all, this year's Mayday was a great success, and we all had a lot of fun.

Squadron Strike Game at MayDay

This last Saturday I hosted a Squadron Strike game at MayDay, our local gaming convention.  This was an interesting experience for me since I'd never hosted a game this complex before, and I had no idea how the players would adapt.  It all turned out quite well though, and we all had a lot of fun.

Initially, only two players signed up for the game, so I assumed this was final and emailed them links to the simple AVT/Squadron Strike introduction flyers on Ad Astra Games' website.  They actually read and understood most of it and went to the game prepared.  However, right before the game the organizers of the convention sent a couple of extra players my way.  When I started explaining the rules, one of the new players, a nice guy I knew from my 40k days, basically ran away. :(  To be fair, he wasn't feeling well and couldn't absorb all the information, and don't worry, he did have fun at another table.  His son, the other new player, was fine with it all and stayed.  So I ended up with three players for my scenario.

The scenario was set in the far off future year of 1985, where a North American Space Command (humans) squadron on patrol made contact with a hostile alien race.  The humans had relatively hard SF ships, with two small corvettes based on the Manned Orbital Laboratory design, and a larger Orion drive ship.  The aliens had bioships, two smaller corvette-sized vessels and a larger cruiser-sized vessel.  The human corvettes each had a beam weapon doing moderate damage up to 15 hexes, with a spherical all-around firing arc.  The alien corvettes each had two forward facing short-ranged beam weapons that did around the same amount of damage, but at a shorter range of 9 hexes max.  The bigger ships were more heavily armed, with the human Orion ship having two forward facing beam weapons of the same type found on the corvettes, a lighter weapon for point-defense, and a heavy beam doing a lot of damage shooting out of the rear arc.  (It was meant to simulate a bomb-pumped laser)  The alien ship had a very long range missile launcher with a spherical arc, and two forward beam weapons like the corvettes.  All ships used mode 2 movement, i.e. fully Newtonian.

The two alien corvettes.

The two human corvettes.

The two bigger ships, the human Orion ship on top, and the alien cruiser on the bottom.

At the start of the scenario, only the two pairs of corvettes were on the board, approaching each other from two perpendicular edges.  You can see all the playing aids scattered around the table.

The human players understood mode 2 movement quite well early on, and they slid their corvettes side-ways to meet the aliens, placing their armoured fronts toward the enemy ships.

For the first couple of turns, the players mostly learned about marking ship orientation and horizontal/vertical thrust on the AVID diagrams representing the ships.

As the ships got closer together, they also got to learn about targeting and firing.

The human ships took advantage of their longer range to concentrate fire on one of the alien corvettes, and it was destroyed pretty quickly.  However, it and its wingman managed to do some damage to one of the human corvettes too.

As per the scenario, the side that lost the first ship had its larger ship arrive on board as reinforcements.  The alien player decided to let the ship cruise slowly and use its long-range missiles.

Here he was figuring out the range for placing missile markers.

The two human ships now concentrated on the one remaining alien corvette.

However, the alien destroyed the damaged human corvette with a close-range shot.

The human corvette was quick to avenge.  This was turning out to be quite a bloody game.

The larger human ship now arrived too.  The human player controlling this ship decided to go for a novel approach - he let the ship fly in backwards, with its heavily armoured rear plate (and bomb-pumped laser) facing the direction of travel.

In the mean time, the remaining corvette kept on shooting down alien missiles, so the cruiser closed in and destroyed it with short-ranged beam weapons.  Up until this point, the players had been flying as if they were in a 2D environment, but they gradually started experimenting with rolling and pivoting the ships, as well as changing their altitude.  Here the alien cruiser actually shot the human corvette from above.

The two big ships now faced each other.  The human player decided to use his front weapons after all, and turned around.  However, his shots were mostly ineffective.

 

He finally decided to switch back to the rear weapon, and managed to do some damage, including structural damage, to the alien cruiser.

At this point though, we were running out of time, and decided to end the game.  It was a minor victory for the humans, since the remaining alien ship had taken more damage.

In the end, the players all liked the game, and they all ended up with a decent grasp of the mechanics.  The only thing I noticed, as mentioned before, was that when they were unfamiliar with the movement rules, they tended to keep to the 2D plane.  I think it was still too early for them to use 3D maneuvers to their advantage, and what little 3D stuff they did only happened at the end.

I was pleasantly surprised that all the (remaining) players were able to learn the rules well enough.  Of course, it helped that at least one of the players had played Starfleet Battles before, and couldn't be intimidated by complex rules. :)

Squadron Strike is not a quick Tuesday night game, but it looks to be a good ruleset for a Saturday all day game.