Games Night!

Last Friday night was games night! My good friend arrived for the evenings battles.
First up he handed me some sprues from Test of Honour as he had bought the game and kindly (rather awesomely I have to say) spilt the forces with me so soon I will have some samurai led forces to add to my model collection.

My 3 samurai heroes!

I'll obviously post pictures of the Japanese force progress.
First game of the night was Across the Dead Earth.  I made up a map of a small area for a campaign between our 2 main gangs. The Coggers  (my friends gang) and the 78th Smethwick Irregulars  (obviously my gang). The premise was a captured map off a State explorer about a recently discovered area.

The captured map

Basic I know but I'm no artist. It's spilt into a grid. You win a game you take a grid. Get all the grids you win!  Or capture the opposing gangs HQ grid you win. This idea uses one of the suggestions in the back of the Across the Dead Earth rulebook as a base. So the battle was a capture the objective and hold it. The objective in question was an abandoned Tesco store. Both gangs at one end of the board with the Tesco on sight.  Some modest loot tokens were around as well.

The game board

My gang has a new member Grimm the gunslinger  (using my gunslinger model I got by backing a kick starter last year). The gangs lined up and away we went.
Our gangs ran up the sides of the battle field a few peeling off to exchange fire to slow up the oppostion

SNAFU and his usually reliable special assault rifle jammed the first shot fired!!!

Dead Eye Dave steps up and adds to the shooting but another poor showing

My first attempts at shooting went terrible the dice rolls were not with me! About half my gang made for Tesco the other kept an eye on being flanked by the opposing gang.

Grimm after clearing a jam takes down a Cogger with his hand cannon

My leader heads the charge for Tesco

Grimm jammed his pistol  (I swear I have never had that many hand before!!!) The gangs started getting close now.

Adahy my scout bravely takes on Wall the Coggers melee specialist

And with a superb roll wins the melee!!!

SNAFU forgetting his jammed assault rule pulls his tomahawk out and engages Lug the Coggers LMG specialist.

SNAFU takes out Lug in melee

A Cogger takes possession of Tesco and waits weapon ready

Next turn up SNAFU decides to take out Lug from the game completely but wait my opponent pullled out a grenade and boom!!!!

My opponent played our 2nd favourite event card!! Can't beat trip wire!

The grenade took out both out gang members. We love the event cards especially this one but our favourite is trip wire  can't beat a bit of petty stopping players running with loot ha ha ha

Adahy falls to Cogger reinforcements

The alley next to Tesco becomes a focal point. Adahy is shot ,a Cogger jams his assault rifle and Dead Eye Dave rolls a head shot instantly taking a Cogger out of the game!

Selene takes out the last Cogger in the alley

With the alley cleared there is one Cogger left holding out.  My gang close in on Tesco. The lone Cogger leans out the door and fires but  to no affect
.

My leader charges the door with his axe

The last surviving Cogger was took down  in melee and I win the game. 
I chose a grid on the map so now that's my territory. Also got a bit of loot and bought me a silencer to add to my gunslingers hand cannon (not sure how that works but he he he).
Next up Star Wars Armada

The fleets line up

We played a 300pt game. (Though we forgot to use various evade tokens but it was getting late and we still had fun lol)  I was as always the resistance and had a fleet comprising off a Nebuleon B frigate (my strongest ship), 2 Corvettes, the Millenium Falcon, Luke Skywalker plus a handful of x wings and b wings.  The opposing fleet had a Star Destroyer (still an imposing model), an Imperial Raider, Boba Fett, Darth Vader and a score of Tie fighters and bombers.

The Heroic Resistance

The dreaded Empire

Battle was joined!!

A rather disorganised start from the Resistance Fleet. The Empire rolled forward

The fleets engage! !!

The fleets engaged the Corvette closest to the Star Destroyer bravelly hit it with all it had sapping shields but was stripped off all shields in return. Fighters engaged with each other trying to keep them away from their own capital ships. 

Fully engaged in close range battle

In the pic above you might notice the lack of an Imperial Raider. After being stripped of shields it received the full frontal battery of my Nebuloen B frigate and disintegrated. Also lost was Boba Fett after a dog fight with Han solo the Corvette added its fire and blew the bounty hunter out of the sky.
Unfortunately my frigate has taken a beating from various shots including Darth Vader and is in a vulnerable situation. The Corvette on the left has taken some horrendous damage from the Star Destroyers side guns.

The fleets pass through one another counting the cost

As you can see from the pics above though getting some solid hits on the Star Destroyer my Frigate faced the full power of its frontal guns and was obliterated!!! The Corvette on the left speeds away desperately trying to raise shields to its rear as it is carrying a lot of damage. The Corvette on the right is attempting to get behind the Star Destroyer. My squadrons start to get the upper hand on their counter parts and bombers head for the Star Destroyer. 

The Millenium Falcon swoops in

The Star Destroyer has only one Hull point left after being attacked from long-range and the Millennium Falcon swoops in to the rear and scored the final hit destroying the Star Destroyer and winning the game.

Overall great games and lots of fun. I always love the skirmish action of Across the Dead Earth and Star Wars Armada grow on me more and more (can't beat a massive space battle!).
Have a great day folks

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Game Night! Part 1

Last night my good friend came over for our usual game night. I was quite excited about this game night as my friend had recently purchased Star Wars Armada. This is made by the people that made X-Wing but uses the bigger capital type ships from the star wars films such as Star Destroyers so every thing is on a bigger scale.

I played the rebel fleet and my friend took charge of the imperial fleet. He had one star destroyer (an absolute beast of a model) and six squadrons of Tie fighters.

My fleet consisted of two capital ships. The CR 90 Corvette  (famously in the first scene of the 'first' star wars) and a Nebulon B frigate (I believe it can be spotted in Return of the Jedi) escorted by 4 squadrons of X-wing.

Nebulon B Frigate

CR 90 Corvette

The game looks quite foreboding when you are getting all the bits and bobs you need out but once you start playing it runs smooth and you can see all the little things they have done to aid the speed of the game. Squadrons of fighters have there own section of the time and are super simple to use but add so much to the game. This makes moving squadrons fairly quick and allows you to concentrate on your capital ships. The capital ships is what the game is all about.  Theu have order dials like x wing  but depending on the ship you have to go stack them up and plan ahead. So a slow strong ship like the star destroyer has 3 order dials and at the start of your game you have to choose orders for all 3 which will be revealed one at a time over the next 3 turns. Each turn you add another order dual to the bottom as you take and activate the top one. This means you need to have a good think about what you plan on doing ahead of time. The dials allow you to speed up or slow down (if you don't choose this on one turn you move at your selected speed), charge your weapons,  make repairs to shields etc and finally order near by squadrons to move and attack.  Next up you attack with up to 2 weapons from different arcs. The ships have various weapons, the strongest being at the front and they have anti fighter weapons to fend off nearby fighter sqaudrons also. After the attack you can manoeuvre  (we did this the opposite way round before realising but finished the game the way we were playing as we were nearly at the end). To move you get a cool movement tool that is spilt into 4 sections which can move left or right a certain number of clicks.  Depending on your ships movement and speed determined how you can manipulate the movement tool.

So after getting set up we used the first scenario type game the book suggests to learn the rules.

Not really knowing the game I set up quite basically giving each ship 2 squadrons of x wings as support. Looking over the star destroyers stats I knew a frontal assault would end badly as my ships lacked the shields to hold out against the big guns for ever so my plan was to spilt my force and circle star destroyer (my ships were far more agile than the star destroyer). The first turn was spent advancing towards each other my ships spliting and going  for either side of the star destroyer.

One capital ship with x wing escorts

The Corvette leaves it's escorts behind!

The two frigates went round the sides while their escorting x wings engaged the tie fighters. My Corvette did manage to get ahead of its escorts and was hit quite a bit by a Tie fighter swarm.

Both rebel ships flanking the slower but more powerful Star Destroyer

The Rebel capital ships Strip the star destroyers rear shields while the x wing squadron goes on a bombing run

My frigates managed to get round to the rear of the star destroyer and a few lucky long range shots stripped its rear shields. Then a plucky x wing squadron took a shot at the star destroyer now lacking shields. Thanks to a handy special rule for x wings attacking capital ship I could potentially cause a critical hit. ....which I rolled! ! The star destroyer ended up with a thruater fissure meaning wverytine it changed speeds it gets one damage Go X wings!!!!!
The next few turns had the star destroyer stuck moving at a speed to fast (remember the orders were set a few turns ago) putting in an awkward position soon it took the damage and slowed down for better control. Using the space given by the star destroyers move my remaining x wings finished off the tie fighters . The game ended (you only play 6 turns) with my capital ships and remaining x wing squadrons chasing after the star destroyer which to be fair had plenty of hull points left and could have repaired shields so if the game would have carried on I think I could have took it out but I would have lost a capital ship.

The rebels chase off the star destroyer!

Victorious Fleet

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