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...

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.

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.