"Perhaps today IS a good day to die!" - Galactica lost! All hands!

"Basestars, ten and two o'clock! Raiders incoming! They're launching missiles!!" And that was how our epic 5 hour Battlestar Galactica game ended on Saturday night, Sunday morning!! Battlestar Galactica (BSG) is one of my favourite themed games and I'll jump at a chance to play. Steve kindly lent his parents grand house whilst they were away and 6 players came to the table, Brian (who supplied BSG, the Pegasus and Exodus add-ons), Tom (Mathematics wizz, but not so good apparently when it comes to setting up the Loyalty deck, but more on that later), Nigel H, Steve, Paul (BSG newbie) and myself. As you can see the table was covered with boards, chits and cards which goes to show the depth of the game and the excitement that was due to come.

Game well under way, my Boomer character is
in the launch hanger ready to go!

Firstly there is the Character Selection - I cheekily jumped in and asked for Boomer - we needed a pilot, but I didn't count on her getting TWO loyalty cards dealt later on (again more later). Steve went for Tom Zarek (Political leader), Nigel went for Col Tigh, Paul went for Support/Engineer Cally, Tom went for President Baltar and finally Brian went for Commander Adama. Being the only pilot I also got the CAG position - a new role that allows my character to control other Vipers whilst flying myself.

Yay I'm Boomer! I was CAG, but what?! I'm a Cylon!? Noooo!

Then came the Loyalty deck - this is a secret hand of cards that determines if you are a Cylon or not - twisting the way you play. I was dealt Not a Cylon. The game set off and straight away there was combat that needed to be resolved. With Pegasus on hand to help we made short work of a basestar but my character ended up in sickbay. That seemed a theme of the night, as soon as I got into a Viper, I'd quickly end up in sickbay! A lot of suspicion was also being laid at my feet for not displaying strong human traits for some reason. Then a lot of suspicion was being laid at Tom's feet - I didn't know why - until suddenly he declared he was a Cylon and Resurrected back to the Cylon fleet; ready to start causing havoc on the human fleet - something which he took with relish.

It's all going wrong...two humans are actually
Cylons - the only pilot and the President!

Mid way to Cobol, the next set of Loyalty cards are dealt; as I was Boomer, I get two cards as did President Baltar. I was dealt a non-Cylon and Cylon Sympathiser ... oh no! It was as it happened in the show! Boomer finds out she's a Cylon! Then we found out there was an irregularity with the cards and they were handed out again. Good - I doubt I'll get the Cylon card again and I get out in my Viper and start blasting toasters!! Except I got it again! Exactly the same card! It must have been fate. So automatically I became a Cylon and transferred to the Cylon fleet. So now my fellow humans suddenly became targets - something I wasn't really sure about - conflicted loyalties! Typical Boomer.

Things start to come to an end - with the new President also a Cylon -
two Basestars attack complete with an attack armada of raiders and heavy raiders.
Galactica suffers its fifth and almost final serious damage marker.

From there it went downhill for the humans - first came one hammering from the Cylons and they suffered some heavy damage. Then suddenly Steve (Tom Zarak) was revealed as a Cylon - leaving the humans without a President (Presidential powers passed to Commander Adama who also had taken on the position of CAG after Boomer had jumped ship) - and hope fading fast. But they battled on, taking on one Crisis card after another, but for some reason, they suffered a serious lack of Jump Prep markers. Finally, after a combined series of assaults by Centurions, several key locations taken and a cataclysmic attack from virtually all directions, Galactica suffered its 6th, and final, serious damage and she was lost, all hands.

"Game over man, game over!" Galactica is gone! 

Over 5 hours had flown by - the game had swung back and forth in favour of the humans and the cylons. In the end the cylons won - but just - the humans just needed to make one more jump to win and the cards were stacked against them. Brilliant game!

"Finish them!!" Blood, sand and ancient battles

Nigel Heather asked me a while back about the Command and Colours (my spelling) system - I hadn't heard of it, but I had heard it's designer Richard Borg and therefore I knew it would be a good game because he also had a hand in Memoir '44. During our recently game of Memoir, we had a look through the two systems he had, Ancients and Napoleonic, and having played a lot of Rome, Medieval and Empire Total War on the PC, I knew these would be to my liking.

We arranged a game of Ancients to start us off with to see how it went. And I have to say I love this gaming system! As it is very much like Memoir, firstly I felt very at home with it - the large hex board, single hex overlays for terrain, command cards and dice rolling for attack and defence.

The first scenario was set in 406BC - The Battle of Akragus - the Carthagians vs the Syracusans (Nigel). As can be seen in the following pictures, units are depicted by wooden blocks with coloured unit pictures on them - these pictures correspond to easy to use crib sheets to show the units movement, attack dice number, range firepower and distance, plus other figures. Unlike wargame systems I've used in the past (I'm thinking Advanced Squad Leader here for starters), the crib sheets are not awash with tiny details on every single possible aspect of battling with the units. That was a big plus point. Just some key numbers - if you are attacking X with Y, you roll Z number of dice.

My Carthagians (bottom) attempt to form a defensive shell

Each dice has coloured markers, red, blue, green, flag (for retreat) plus leader symbols and crossed swords. This allows a great deal of simplicity in combat - if a unit attacks a green infantry type, check the crib sheet, see it uses 4 dice, is allowed to use crossed swords as a hit. Roll the dice, get 2 greens and one crossed swords, so three enemy units are removed. It's as simple as that.

There are some similarities in Memoir 44 - such as each player is dealt command cards that indicate which units on the field can be used (left, centre, right or a particular type such as cavalry), the dice combat, terrain and movement. There are a few differences which make the game, in my view, that much more tactical and requiring you to think a bit more about how and why you do things. The first is Leaders - your army can come with one or more Leaders who are added to a unit and allow a dice roll to use the Leader marker as a hit, allowing some devastating attacks. Another is in Memoir, if you move into close combat and the defender fails to break or is not destroyed, the units remain facing each other and there is no come back on the attacker. This is different in Ancients in that if the defender is not broken or destroyed, they get a chance to attack back, possibly leading to the destruction of the attacker! This changes the balance of the tactics some what and makes a more thoughtful game. There is also the extra ability to move the entire army, as long as each unit is connected to another to form a line, forward as a single unit one space - this represents the tactic in the ancient world of just moving one vast number of troops towards another in one go.

Nigel's Red heavy troops move into attack

We played two scenarios - the one listed above where I was destroyed by Nigels victorious army and the second was at the Crimissos River in 341 BC with the Carthagians (Nigel) vs Syracusans. This time Nigel was deployed in two places, one in front of my army, the other on the other side of the river. He had some very powerful troops on the other side of the river, but they could only cross at certain key points. I had to quickly move up my archers and slingers to take out as many as I could before they crossed (not many!) before they had to fall back under the weight of the attack. Then I brought my heavy infantry to bear in two directions, North and North-East towards the river, splitting Nigel further and preventing his river crossing troops from helping out his other soldiers. A couple of lucky Utilise all Heavy Troops cards allowed me to close the trap on the unlucky troops crossing the river, as any troops that tried to retreat ran into Nigels army behind them and had to loose more units for failing to retreat!

Crushing the Carthagians as they cross the river!

Bringing the game to a close, I won 5:3 (which was the same historical result), whilst the first battle was won 5:4 to Nigel. Fantastic system, can't wait to play again to see other unit types - it's a pity the add ons are so hard to get hold of.