GenCon

> Dean Gundberg wrote:

<<< Why don't we all meet at the Geo-Hex booth as many did last year
when Jon Tuffley was at GenCon.

 KR  >>>

 He's not there this year? :-0   Darn

> What day are we going to meet?

 How 'bout Friday, high noon, by Geo-Hex.

> Dean Gundberg wrote:

Sounds great to me! I'll see you all there. Later,

> At 12:48 AM 8/1/97 -0500, you wrote:

> How 'bout Friday, high noon, by Geo-Hex.

> sounds good, see you all there

Not me, I'm afraid. I'm running an FT game at that time.

> Date: Mon, 4 Aug 1997 01:35:13 -0400 (EDT)

> At 12:48 AM 8/1/97 -0500, you wrote:

> At 10:25 AM 8/4/97 +0000, you wrote:

Hi all,

I just got back from GenCon (I had to spend yesterday in Detroit), and I must
say it was quite a pleasure to meet some of the people on this list!

On both Saturday and Sunday we managed to set up Full Thrust games with Allan
Goodall, Mike Miserindino (sp?), Mark Siefert (pronounced
see-fert),
Dean Gundberg, Chris Pratt, and one other guy (a Macintosh programmer whose
name escapes me at the moment) as players. The games went very well, and all
the players had a good time.

In general, it seemed to me that this year's GenCon was a little smaller
and less hectic than last year -- the crowds weren't as unruly, and it
was easier to travel through the brownian motion of people in the exhibitor's
hall.  I think that there were less collectible-card-game players and
traders, and it looked like there was a small increase in the number of
miniatures games, but I don't know whether there was a change in the
number of role-playing events since last year.

I didn't find any fantastic deals on miniatures at any of the dealers' booths
this year; the best one I found was a guy who was selling some Ral Partha 25mm
fantasy packs at 33% off retail. I have to admit, though, that I bought all
eight of GZG's new "Combat Babes" 25mm figure packs at the
Geo-Hex booth! They'll be a surprise at my next StarGrunt game. :)

> Rick Rutherford wrote:

> I must say it was quite a pleasure to meet some of the people on this

Hey Rick, will you be giving some nice anecdotes and stories on some of the FT
games that were played at GenCon.

> Rick wrote:

I was disappointed with the game speed. In testing and at PentaCon(with Novice
players) last year the game moved fairly quickly with a decisive
victory.   I took some elements out of the game and reduced the number
of ships on the Alien side to speed it up more. One novice player stated he
played SFB before and seemed like he would find FT easy.

Playing the aliens we had Rick and Mark with two novices while the Earth
forces were run by Dean, Allan, and two novices. It seemed like everyone on
the Earth side had seen DS before. All the Thermo Stellar Bombs that dropped,
dropped without any side effects, with the exception of one that dropped
outside the gravity well of the planet and just sat there ticking away. None
of the bombs were destroyed and none actually reached the planet.

Early in the game, the Earth players quickly found that if they moved a ship
within short range of one of the Phoenix asteroids, their ship's current
screen level was increased to level-3 while it was near the asteroid.

By the third turn of the game, we had some good ship combat taking place.
Allan parked his capital ship with the Futtock Gun(Jon T's early version of
the wave gun) right in front of the station. The station took a whopping from
the Futtock Gun which fired without a hitch. Additional hits from Earth ships
sent the station into at least two thresholds in one turn.

Gravity started to influence the larger Earth ships and sent a couple out of
control. Allan's ship, Lewis, was now parked with its rear facing the rear of
the station. with the station's rear weapons disabled, neither Allan or the
station could shoot at each other by the next turn.

The base controling players from the alien side each had a special version of
the cloaking device. When activated it would distort the image of the base's
launched ships appearing to reflect something from the Earth forces
imagination. This would also increase the screen level of the protected ships
by one level each while lowering the screen level of the base station.

The aliens hoped to create a menacing vision from their attacker's fear.
Unfortunately, not all the Earth crews had the current situation of their
mind. Only one base activated the field which turned one of its system defense
cruisers into a hot dog as Rick mentioned. By the time this was done the hot
dog was out of effective range while most of the Earth ships were in range of
the station. Again, the station got clobbered while its
surviving cruiser/hot dog was on a collision course with one of the
Phoenix asteroids.

Overall, I think the players had a good time. We found that the fighters
played almost no role in the game, except to slow it down. I plan to remove
the fighters from this scenario and maybe cut back on the Earth ships as well.
I am also going to increase the chance of bomb failures(We needed some real
explosions!;)). I did request to list the game as intermediate, but it was
listed as novice.

> The neatest thing about the game was Mike's plastic wave gun template.