GenCon Mailing List Game Review

I think it was Mike and I, after last year's GenCon, who thought of having a
Full Thrust game specifically for mailing list members. After several months
of planning, we decided on a 1500 point game. No alien weapons were allowed,
and the Nova cannon was outlawed. You had to have at least on capital ship,
two cruisers and three escorts. These were minimums, but the number of
cruisers had to exceed the number of capital ships, and the number of escorts
had to exceed the number of cruisers.

The one problem we had was deciding on a day to play the game. We decided to
wait until the con to make a decision. In the end we thought of playing two
games. I don't know if an earlier game came off, but we did end up playing a
game on Sunday around noon (actually it was 1:30 before we got started).

About half the interested members couldn't play the game. I didn't get a
chance to meet John Kovalic, John Huber, or Mike Messenger in person. However,
we did have four players: me, Dean Gundberg, Mark A. Siefert, and Chris Pratt.
Mike Miserendino acted as GM for as long as he could (he had to leave early)
and Rick Rutherford came by to observe. Bryan Miller dropped by briefly. We
randomly chose sides. Dean and I squared off against Chris and Mark. We each
took one quadrant of the board, setting up on the long table edges.

We had a mixed bag of figures. I brought my Star Frontiers ships. I ran the
human ships, painted in either metallic blue or metallic maroon with Ral
Partha "ancient metal" highlights. Dean used my Sathar ships from the same
line. I had a problem with my air brush and feared I wouldn't have the Sathar
ships painted in time. My wife jumped in and volunteered to paint
them by hand. They are in metallic green and metallic pink/purple (the
"pink" colour is an Armoury metallic paint half way between a dark pink or a
light purple). Dean coined it the Revlon fleet. I took pictures of the ships
for Tom Granvold's web page and his SF miniatures FAQ.

On the other side of the table, Mark had some Starblazers miniatures. They
were unpainted in metallic grey plastic. They are a bit smaller than FT ships
and looked quite small compared to my large Star Frontiers ships. However,
they would make a really good FT fleet. They are large enough for reasonable
use but small enough to play in a "centimetres" game if the player wanted to.
Chris bought some FT figures at the con but brought some Star Trek
micromachines for the game. It wasn't the most aesthetic game I've seen, but
once things got going no one really noticed.

I kept my fleet fairly straightforward. The centrepiece was a
battledreadnought with two fighter squadrons, A batteries, 2 C batteries, and
some PDAFs (I assumed that I'd be up against a number of fighters). Dean's
fleet was also pretty normal, mostly beam weapons, pulse torpedoes, and
submunition packs.

I kept my ships moving in a group at a speed of 3 on the first turn, deciding
to play it conservatively. I launched a fighter squadron. The A batteries of
my cruisers were in range and I blew away one of Chris' escorts on the first
turn. He launched a fighter group from his carrier and let it fall behind his
other ships. On the other half of the table, Dean moved up his Sathar ships
fairly quickly as Mark did likewise.

On the second turn, Dean fired on Mark's dreadnought. Mark, who's fleet was
the most esoteric of the four, announced he had a reflex field and rolled for
it. In what would prove to be a recurring theme, Mark rolled badly and took
full damage from a failure in the field. Meanwhile Chris and I continued to
joust. We both had all fighters launched. I took out another escort while
Chris did some damage to one of my two light cruisers.

On turn three, Mark fired the wave gun on one of his cruisers. Out came the
template mentioned in Mike's description of his Dark Star game: the "yellow
tongue of death!" In another fit of bad luck, his cruiser was aimed so that
the template went right between two Sathar ships, missing both. In response,
Dean concentrated on Mark's dreadnought, blowing it up fairly quickly. Chris
and I continued to trade shots before he announced that he was about to send
one of his escorts into FTL. By this time both of my cruisers were hurt, but
Chris had lost three escorts.

On turn four, I turned my ships away from Chris' ship hitting FTL. Chris
emptied his missile cruisers at me. Most of the missiles were aimed at my
battledreadnought but some ran into my second cruiser. I lost all my A
batteries except one and two shield levels to the missiles. Threshold checks
crashed my remaining shield and killed off four of my five damage control
parties. Ouch! With shields down, his other ships took me through a second
threshold check. I also lost one fighter squadron and one escort. One cruiser
had a lot of hull damage but most of its systems, the other was only down one
level of hull damage but lost ALL its A batteries to threshold rolls. On the
plus side, I had two untouched escorts now within close range of their 4 C
batteries each and Chris' missile cruisers were essentially empty.

On the other side, Mark's luck put him at a disadvantage to Dean. Dean angled
through Mark's fleet as Mark swung his ships around to bring their wave guns
to bear. A couple of Mark's escorts died as did one of Dean's.

I continued to fire on Chris' cruisers, taking one out with help from Dean
(who was now entering through Dean's right flank). Dean fired into the
carrier, damaging it. Mark brought a wave gun to bear and dropped it onto
three Sathar vessels, killing two escorts and badly damaging a cruiser.
Unfortunately Chris' carrier fell into the extreme range of the template. The
carrier was damaged with friendly fire. For my part, I continued the joust
with Chris. Some excellent damage control rolls almost made up for the bad
threshold rolls. The battledreadnought got a shield up while the one cruiser
regained two A batteries.

One more turn and we were ready to call it a game. Chris hit me with
everything he had. While bleeding, my ships were still standing. Surprisingly,
two escorts were completely untouched. Chris, on the other hand, had two empty
missile cruisers, a badly damaged escort, a damaged and mostly toothless
carrier, and another cruiser that Dean and I continued to concentrate on. Mark
was missing his big dreadnought, a cruiser, and half his escorts. Dean was
mostly intact. His dreadnought hadn't taken any damage, as was also the case
with one cruiser and two escorts. More than that, most of Mark's fleet was
heading away from Dean while Dean and I had Chris in a pincer movement. It was
pretty obvious that Dean and I had things well in hand. With half an hour left
in the convention and a dealer's room to stalk one last time, we called the
game. Total elapsed time: 2 hours.

This game was a very good idea. I got to put names to faces and play against
other fans of the game. I took plenty of pictures during the con. I don't
think any of us did anything radically wrong. Mark's ships had the potential
of doing a lot of damage, but his luck wasn't with him and he was chewed up
early. There was little finesse in the fencing between Chris and me, little to
criticize.

I have a group picture from just before the mailing list game, and I took a
couple of pictures during the game itself. I'm getting them put on Photo CD;
hopefully I'll be able to get them on a web site somewhere. If not, I'll let
the list know about the pictures in case anyone wants to see them. If anyone
wants a hard copy photograph, you can let me know after you see the images.

Oh, and a note to Rick Rutherford: you left your measuring tape at the game
and I have it. Let me know what you want me to do with it. If you want a copy
of the group picture, I can send it to you at the same time I send the
picture. Otherwise, I can mail it out separately or we can wait until next
year.

> Allan Goodall wrote: