As I was hosting the Clash Over the Desert game, I thought I'd jump in here with some answers to Captain Gideon's questions.
We had five players moving ships around the table that night, at Houston's Stag's Head Pub. The scenario was over French Northwest Africa.
The Great War is coming to Europe. The geopolitical stresses leading up to this point in our version of history have been pretty well documented through our blog posts on our site, as each of our Aeronef/Aquanef/Land Ironclad (and in one case, a parallel In Her Majesty's Name) games have been played.
This particular scenario had the European nations flexing their muscles over the African desert.
The French had discovered R-Matter deposits and had built an extraction operation to pull that R-Matter out of the ground. They were looking to defend their operation.
France had recently signed a pact of mutual cooperation and defense with Italy and so Italian engineers were assisting the French in their extraction efforts, for a share of the R-Matter extracted.
The Italian force was there to protect their engineering interests. They had no love for the region or its people otherwise.
The British wanted nothing more than to see the extraction operation come to an end, but their other goal was to place CAP over a nearby ancient historic site (the Temple of Wubakhamun), which the Conservators of the British Museum were interested in (one of our tie-ins with a recent In Her Majesty's Name game).
The Austro-Hungarians were allied with the British and also wanted to see the French extraction operation curtailed. Their secret objective was to bomb the French desert fort of La Berge, which would help weaken the local French land forces (the Austro-Hungarians had desert territorial ambitions, should the Great War come).
The Turks were a new arrival, being sympathetic to the local Muslim population and less than happy to see western governance over the native peoples. Their mission was to drop propaganda leaflets over the two mosques/villages, to foment rebellion among the local populace. The Turkish commander was also secretly a member of the Servants of Wubakhamun, and as such, had orders to place CAP over the Temple of Wubakhamun. The Turks were also drawn here because Turkey is low on R-Matter, so gaining access to the local R-Matter deposits through overseeing a Victorian-Era "Arab Spring" against French governance wouldn't be a bad thing.
I don't know exactly how many ships were involved. It varied from force to force. I'd say between 10 and 30 ships per player, depending on ship class. Surely there were 100 ships, or close to that.
These are all my cell phone pictures. We had a club member there who is a "professional" photographer and I expect to be posting his pictures to our site this weekend. I'll add a few here and link to the rest too. I'll write a more formal after action report for our site when those pictures are available to illustrate it.
reveals a long-lost Martian tripod.
