Saturday
Once again, I arrive bright and early for gaming. I was signed up for the Mars Needs Steam game and arrived early enough to take a few photos of other games being set up, then ran into a couple of old friends from my Roanoke days (hi, Craig and Francis!) and ended up catching up a bit, finally getting back to Mars (so to speak) for game start.
As is traditional (third year in a row), I took my seat as the Russian player, prepared to deliver a Martian valley to the tender rule of the Tsar of All the Russias.
I had an advantage this time that I don't usually get—a corner seat, so only had to contend with two opposing players. The Anarchists were across from my position and the Americans were on my right. The good news was that I secured a quick truce with the American player—I would not shoot at him if he didn't shoot at me and didn't enter my little end of the valley. The Anarchist, on the other hand, proudly proclaimed that the world was his enemy--that little clue told me where I had to concentrate my forces. The other difference this time from last time was that I had a flyer! It was a wonderful model, mounting two Nordenfeld "machine guns" and a quick firing cannon. Even though the Anarchist lacked a flyer, he did, unfortunately, have some pretty powerful weaponry that outranged mine and was, potentially, twice as accurate to boot! Well, the possibility of a few losses never hindered the grand plans of the Russian nobility, so on I marched (and flew, rode and crawled).
I actually ended up sending one unit of infantry and a crawler toward the Americans, but they were there only to keep them honest (and, coincidentally, the infantry and my archaeologist could snatch up an objective marker on top to the mountain separating us). My unit of land-bound sailors, supported by the airship, moved to climb the mountain separating the Russians and Anarchist on my left (his right) flank to grab another objective. The remainder of my force, with the expedition leader in the fore, plowed into the Martian jungle and straight toward the heavy Anarchist forces heading toward the Tsar's valley, as well as two more objective markers. The star on my side was the airship, which wounded everything before it and just barely managed to survive repeated hits by a heat ray and volleys of magazine rifle fire. I did get very lucky in that the Anarchist's walker was injured early on by a concentrated blast from my little crawler's Maxim gun and that the Anarchists second heat ray never managed to hit (rolled a "1" every time it fired). I pushed the Anarchist forces back and my airship returned to my lines after making a circuit of the enemy's forces. My sailors also did well, reaching the mountain top and discovering giant eggs, there, which they removed before the minions of the Anarchist could reach that spot. Alas, my efforts were in vain, as another Justice faction player on the other end of the table secured many more points than I. When I arrived home, my wife laughed since I had come in second, which was my curse for many years of gaming.
Next came a game of Tomorrow's War. I had been looking forward to trying out this game and its modern-era version, Force on Force for a while, as I have both rule sets. Friday, I'd had participated in the Grozny FonF game, and now Saturday I got to try out TW. In the TW game, I was on the left flank of a rebel/mercenary defense force protecting the entrance to a valley from the forces of the (evil) Tyrell Corporation. The Tyrell troops were all robotic, so had some special rules, and their reinforcements consisted of a GIANT walking tank that was very tough and whose guns were almost Ogre/Bolo level deadly. The objective for the battle was to deny the village to the corporate troops. The battle started off fairly badly, as our forces kept missing their interrupt rolls, essentially losing their turn and getting pounded by the toasters (as we took to calling the robots), with only a few exceptions. And we rolled a lot of "1" results on our interruptions, which gave us many draws from the fog of war random occurrences deck. The good news was that several of our draws were actually good things, which toughened up our defenses a little bit.
On the left flank, we managed to severely hurt the toasters and keep them from gaining any ground, but the mercenaries' center and right flank forces suffered heavily and this only got worse when the big bad guy tank arrived and its "light" attack flyer. Then our reinforcements arrived (a squad of hover bikes and a heavy tank platoon), and things turned around a bit with my first (sacrificial) attack on the giant tank, which actually managed to do some damage. I suffered for it of course, but not in a fatal way. Another of our tanks managed to blast the flyer out of the sky—hooray for the humans! At this point, time ran out but the players wanted to play on as the toasters were right on the verge of capturing a building in the town. I couldn't stay for that, as I had to run home to do some shopping with my wife and daughter.
I visited the dealer area, in between turns, and ended up getting another box of Wargames Factory figures—this time, Saxon Thegns—again from the Norfolk gaming shop's booth.
Sunday
Sunday has gotten to be a pretty empty day at Historicon—I guess folks are tired after all that gaming the previous days and are just looking forward to getting home—but I always try to run a game on Sunday to give folks something to do. This time, it was a return to Ceres Station, a continuation of the games from previous years' Sundays. Last year, the UN sent a mission to Ceres Station to determine what had happened there—but due to some friendly fire incidents, plus a few zombies and giant mutated spiders, the rescue team left before a thorough investigation could be completed.
This year, it wasn't a rescue attempt—a UN team along with some force augmentation by private contractors, moved in to sweep the station of any infestation. The good news was that they didn't see any zombies in the main concourse. There was an attack by giant mutated arachnids when they mercenaries investigated the restroom, but those creatures were taken care of relatively quickly—though one mercenary was bitten and required the gentle ministrations of the UN doctor. Unfortunately, this bred a certain level of unfounded confidence.
As the team investigated the main concourse, with mercenaries looted the food service area and the mercenary leader hacked into the entertainment console to set up (unauthorized) communications with Earth. If he'd just stopped with that, everything might have gone well, but since this was the entertainment console, he sent Led Zeppelin blasting from the station's public address system, alerting the intelligent non-human inhabitants of the station that dinner had arrived. And so the Tyranids came to collect their food.
See, the station has a Doorways Technology research center, which had been experimenting with inter-dimensional portals and unfortunately opened one to the GW Universe and collected a few ‘nids, who promptly colonized the station as their own. A small horde of Genestealers and Guants came racing into the backside of the concourse, accompanied by a few floating spore mines. The humans formed a firing line and began shooting up the horde, but suffered casualties as their inhuman enemies bore in. Finally, using lasers, grenades, and flame, the team managed to cut down all of the mobile Tyranids, but the price had been heavy, with two humans obviously dead and four more "out of action" (this was out of a total of 16 troops).
But the game was not done yet, as various players had additional objectives, which they then proceeded to try and accomplish. One player blasted the entertainment center computer, which finally stopped the music, but also cut that avenue for communication with Earth, which forced the UN doctor to try and find an alternate link with Earth that did not have to go through a UN censor. In this, he succeeded, so managed to meet his victory conditions. The mercenary leader tried dragging an "out of action" genestealer out to the airlock, but got into a fight with the UN leader, who was trying to finish the creature off. In the end, the UN Lieutenant ended up shooting the mercenary and the creature, but this started a quick firestorm of shooting between mercenaries and UN troops, with a few more casualties from it before wiser heads prevailed and the shooting died down. The good news for the UN sniper was that his goal was to kill five opponents—and fighting the arachnids and Tyranids only gave him 5 kills—with the mercenary conflict, he managed another kill, letting him meet his victory conditions! The UN medic met his condition as he quietly collected mutant arachnid DNA. With the station still not completely explored, the force left for Mars—carrying two infected persons (one was infected by the zombie virus from eating exposed food, while the other was carrying spores from one of the spore mines). That means next year's game should take place on a terraformed Mars…or maybe not. We'll see.
And with that, Historicon 2014 came to a close. Traffic home was, thank goodness, pretty light for a Sunday, so I managed to make it in time for a web meeting I was scheduled to attend. Yay.
My report on Saturday and Sunday's events, including photos.
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Link to photos from the Mars Needs Steam battle.
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Looking forward to next year!
Rob
