Busy day today, but it started off with some gaming.
First up was some 15mm sci-fi skirmish and playtest of the Impact rule system. On one side we had a group of Space Sharks (replete with Self Contained Out-of-water Breathing Apparatus) backed up by a couple of squads of Andorrans, two shark guys in power armor and a group of Space Ogres. They'd landed on New Tennessee and taken over a small farm. Opposing them were Space Rednecks, their rag-tag collection of vehicles and a squad of Space Legionaries (no idea why they were there).
We set up (hiding some of our troopers) and they came at us. Probably the most interesting thing was one of the shark guys got into a car and rolled over a bunch of enemy troopers. In the end we lost because the space rednecks set fire to the things they were supposed to destroy but we didn't know what their objective was so it was hard to defend against.
The rule system was fast and simple and it used a card-activation system which I enjoy. The basic mechanic was roll 1 die for the quality of your troop (d4 to d8 depending) and the defender rolls their quality die plus another die for any cover. You compared each roll (from highest to lowest on both sides) and scored pins or kills. The problem was that the shooting was very ineffective compared to close-combat -- in shooting, the defender had the extra cover and there really wasn't any way for the attacker to add anything. The GM mentioned that there were rules for support weapons that added an extra die and that would probably be useful in the future. It was a shakedown of the rules and a fun time.
We finished up pretty quickly so I got into a one-on-one game of Hammerin' Iron a Civil War naval ruleset. We had the classic Monitor vs. Merrimack clash. I was in the Merrimack. I was slower and less maneuverable and less armored than my opponent, but I had a broadside that could peel open a fortress -- if I could bring it to bear. The system is kind of interesting, you put down these hexes that your ship "travels" on. This helps determine firing arcs and can be used to resolve rams and other bookkeeping efficiently. You have pseudo-random control over your ships in that you draw a hand of five cards from one of two decks (one more movement oriented, the other more firing oriented). Firing is resolved via a bucket of dice and it's cumulative critical hits that will win the day rather than actually doing enough damage to sink the enemy. My ship had over 2600 hull points so it wasn't going down easily. But every five damage points, another critical hit roll came up.
So I plodded after my nimble opponent. He kept plinking at me. I wasn't able to get a good broadside on him for awhile, but my front-mounted guns did start a couple of pesky fires that did some damage. Finally guessed right, put him on my broadside and hammered his ship causing a smokestack hit that reduced his speed. He returned the favor a couple rounds later and it devolve into a very slow fight until I made a bad critical hit roll and blew up.
So obviously I hate the game. :) No, it was interesting. It probably would be more fun with an extra ship or two on both sides. I think one-on-one fights are a little too small, but you want to be careful or it's going to get way too complex if you have a lot of boats.
So that's what I played today.
