GenCon Review with a GZG Emphasis (part 2 of 4)

The First Day

I usually leave the Thursday morning slot open at GenCon. This lets me get
into the dealer's room as it opens. There were a number of
interesting things this year. I picked up the board game _Cults Across
America_, an officially licensed Call of Cthulhu product produced by
Atlas Games. I also got sucke... persuaded to buy a Cults t-shirt and
"cult crossing" sign. The sign is a large, heavy plastic, yellow diamond road
sign with the silhouette of a cowled figure carrying a flamethrower in the
middle. Below the diamond is a yellow rectangle that says "Cult
Crossing Next 3000 Miles." Very cool. :-)  Chaosium was selling Elder
Sign pendants, something my roleplaying group had been hoping to find
for years. I'm a big _Call of Cthulhu_ fan, so miniatures and Cthulhu
are my main GenCon attractions. The only downer of the day was that I lost a
brand new dice bag with brand new dice I had bought for SG2. I had to buy them
again the next day, for a loss of about $20 in dice. The plastic bag they were
in had ripped and they fell out. Needless to say I wasn't a happy camper.

> From a miniatures perspective, there seemed to be more miniatures
Lance and Laser (with Fortress Miniatures), Goblintooth (Hostile Aircraft),
Easy Eight (Battleground World War II), Lou Zocchi (with his plastic Star Trek
ships, and yes he is very much alive). What's interesting was that a lot of
these companies that were primarily
lead-only had rule sets out, as well as miniatures. RAFM had _Universal
Soldier_, Demonblade had _Shockforce_. Even RPG publisher White Wolf had
its SF/superhero miniatures game out, as did CCG/RPG publisher Five
Rings Publishing (now owned by WOTC) with their Clan Wars minis game.

I didn't get a chance to try a lot of different systems. Due to a tip by Rick
Rutherford, I picked up the Shockforce rulebook (until Rick told me, I didn't
know they were selling the rules separately from the boxed edition). I took a
look at Clan Wars. Yes, it is supposed to be a FANTASY game, but I thought it
might work as a samurai historical game. It won't. There seemed to be very
little in the way of samurai flavour. There are no honour rules, for instance,
or rules for samurai army formations. It could just as easily have been orcs
or Romans fighting. A couple of companies had starship combat games, but I
don't think they will touch Full Thrust. I heard rumours that GW was bringing
back their Starfleet line, which might be of interest to FT players.

The first game I played was a St. Lo scenario for _Battleground World
War II_. This is a nice set of rules. It's a WWII skirmish set that is
well laid out and easy to learn. The company also has an attitude similar to
GZG: you bought the rules, so you make of them what you like. They support the
game well and they run an interesting scenario. It had the feel of a
historically accurate game, which was good having recently
seen _Saving Private Ryan_. (Hint: see this movie!!!) The figures were
pretty nice, but of a strange scale for historicals. They are around
28mm. The intention was for them to match 1/48 scale, a popular plastic
model scale. This makes them nice and visual, but also makes them incompatible
with most other WWII scales. The game can easily be played in the more popular
HO, 20mm, and 15mm scales, though. I can recommend this rule set to WWII
gamers.

I was supposed to play Stargrunt 2 next, but ended up getting roped into
running the game instead of playing it. Jeff Guillion asked me to run
the game because Peter, the designated ref, was slated for back-to-back
games and needed a break. Jeff taught the rules, and Peter and I ran the game.
The problem was that I play a pure SG2 game while Jeff and Peter use a number
of house rules. The result for the first 30 minutes was chaos as I was making
different rulings than Peter. Peter, thankfully, is pretty perceptive and
realized this. He bowed out, and with one referee it went much smoother. I'm
taking this as an object lesson. Either don't play a demo game with ANY house
rules, or make sure everyone knows them up front, or make sure there is ONE
referee that makes all the decisions. The players enjoyed themselves, though,
and really liked the game.

The last game of the night was a Full Thrust game using Lew Stoneking's house
rules for Sa'vasku. It was a Sa'vasku vs. Kravak game. I've never seen Kravak
players so humbled before... To be honest (as the Sa'vasku admiral) the rules
still need to be cleaned up a tad. In particular, Sa'vasku were taking damage
in a turn but the effect on their power use didn't happen until the following
turn. This was a big advantage. Another was the Sa'vasku beam weaponry that
was not only more powerful at shorter ranges, but more effective as well.
Still, there is something very enjoyable about rolling 34 dice for a beam hit
on an enemy ship! I think Lew is on to something, but it still needs a bit of
work. In the end, the Sa'vasku lost one element (out of 4; it was commanded by
Dean
Gundberg who was more-or-less intentionally left without support) and
three or four other ships, while the Kravak lost their entire fleet. Lopsided,
but lots of fun.