Wargames Weekend: Poseidon’s Song

Our final game of the weekend was a first outing for Lenin's Star Trek figures using Rattrap's Fantasic Worlds rules. Here's the brief:

The USS Hammersley, a scout class vessel, under the command of Commander Michael Flynn was on regular patrol on the edge of known space, when it suddenly detected a previously un-catalogued signal emanating from the planet P3X-866. This planet has only been surveyed from orbit and though it is M Class, no signs of current intelligent life were detected. However, ancient and uninhabited ruins were observed from orbit, so it would seem that the planet once supported intelligent life. Given that the majority of the planet’s surface is now covered in water, hence its unofficial name of Poseidon, the current theory is that rising sea levels eventually drowned this long dead civilisation. Poseidon is earmarked for a full planetary survey sometime in the next five years.

Using is own initiative, the maverick Commander Flynn beamed down to Poseidon with a small landing party to investigate this unknown signal, but on landing, the party discovered that the signal seemed to be jamming their communicators, thus preventing contact with the ship or beaming back. Lieutenant Blake, the Hammersley’s Science Officer, suggests that they need to locate the source of the signal and somehow turn it off, but before the landing party can start their search, the realise that they are not alone…

I played the Star Fleet landing party stranded on the planet and we began the first of the three "acts". Whilst searching the alien ruins we heard gunfire and, on investigation, discovered some ape astronauts who were also stranded on the planet's surface. In addition, we discovered a hostile indigenous species of "crabman". These creatures were quite hostile and pretty tough and our phasers didn't seem to have much of an effect on their carapaces.

Between us and the team from the Ape Astronautical and Space Administration we managed to triangulate the position of the signal which was interfering with our instruments and moved off in that direction.

Moving through the ruins we encountered some quicksand and several more crabmen but managed to find the entrance to the structure from which the signal was emanating.

Moving inside we were lucky enough to discover some buried controls for the alien device but not before stumbling upon some more crabmen. Our teams split up and tried to hold off the crabmen whilst the others uncovered the controls. We managed to scare one of the creatures away but another was quite a different proposition and was it took both the Captain and the Science Officer to keep it occupied. With the controls uncovered we just needed to discover how they worked. Fortunately the apes discovered some tablets (no not iPads!) with some instructions but unfortunately another crabman appeared. A running battle ensued with all of te Star Fleet personnel but my First Officer becoming incapacitated and the apes nearly suffering the same fate. IN a nail biting conclusion the apes managed to activate the controls and a landing party beamed down from the Hammersley just in time to save the day!

Gaming Weekend - Day Three

Air Assault on Cemetery Hill, 20 May 1941
For our third and final day we used Lenin's desert terrain mat and the figures he had been frantically painting on the day before the weekend.

The scenario was an adapted version of one from the SkirmishCampaigns booklet and involved a German parachute drop where the drop zone was between some Greek and New Zealand troops (whose presence and strength were a bit of a surprise to the Fallschirmsjaeger) with the objective of capturing the nearby cemetery hill.

The drop went well with the Fallschirmsjaeger not too widely scattered but unluckily for them a large number landed in the open in front of a Kiwi bren gun team. Their main problem was that the German dropped with only small arms with all the larger weapons (SMGs, riles, LMGs etc.) in separate containers. The paras took some serious casualties trying to retreive their weapons before being able to supress the Kiwi squad overlooking their position and using the cover to avoid the attentions of the bren gun team. With only about half of their number left they then advanced on cemetary hill which was being held by the Greeks. Fortunately these were lower rep troops and, after a short firefight, the hill was taken.

In this case the troops were all from Crusader and the rules were Two Hour Wargames' Chain Reaction 3.0.

The Third Droid
Our final tabletop game was a three act scenario using Rattrap's Fantastic Worlds rules and some figures from Lenin's extensive collection of 25mm Star Wars miniatures.

According to the scenario Episode 4: A New Hope failed to show that a third droid had been jettisoned from Princess Leia's ship with other Imperial plans. This one had made planetfall in a remote hidden valley on Tatooine.

The first encounter saw a unit of stormtroopers and another of rebels looking for a guide to lead them to the hidden valley. With both sides wanting to avoid a confrontation which might have eliminated the guide in the crossfire the rebels found the Gamorrean guide first and left being followed by the Imperial troops.

The second act opened with the two groups looking for the rock formation which showed the way into the hidden valley. Unfortunately there were a number of Tusken Raiders waiting to ambush unsuspecting visitors. After a little skirmish the rebels managed to find the rock formation and the two groups made their way into the valley.

The final act saw the rebels and stormtroopers in a desperate race to find the droid amongst some ancient ruins. Unfortunately they were not alone in the ruins. It turns out that Jabba the Hutt didn't have the only Rancor on the planet! The stormtroopers stumbled into some more sand people and whilst they were fighting them off the rebels found the droid. A heroic fight between a Jedi and the Rancor gave the rebels time to escape with the droid despite taking, and indeed causing, some casualties.

We finished the weekend of gaming with a game of Ticket to Ride using the original rules but with the larger USA 1910 expansion cards (including the Mystery Train ones).

I'll follow up with a post linking to the photos from the weekend.

Thrilling Expeditions: Valley of the Thunder Lizard

The latest supplement from Rattrap Productions has just made it's PDF debut. Thrilling Expeditions: Valley of the Thunder Lizard is slightly different from previous supplements as it's designed to work with several of their genre rulesets, in this case, .45 Adventure (pulp), Gloire (swashbuckling) and Fantastic Worlds (pulp SF).

Valley of the Thunder Lizard is 126 pages long and is intended to be the first of a series. In brief it covers adventures with dinosaurs, so the Lost World, anything with Doug McClure in it, time travelling tourists in pre-history etc.

It contains a few new rules, some new archetypes (one each for the 3 rule sets) a couple of new special abilities (Big Game Hunter and Tracking), stats for various dinosaurs (including info on how to create them), prehistoric mammals, neanderthals, saurians and scenarios for each of the three genres.

At $12 for the PDF it's pretty good value (especially with current exchange rates) and will make some interesting reading!