The Great Download Caper

In the far future world of Battletech, only one building in the galaxy holds the complete musical archives of Australian band 'The Cat Empire'. And the company that owns it plans to erase it!

Five squads of mechs descend on the city to take the music before it's wiped. The more that each squad can collect the more valuable a resource it is for them. If other squads can be prevented from downloading then its value increases.

The stage is set for a five-player game of Alpha Strike. Each of us had 250 points of mechs and vehicles, and our objective was the cobbled square in the centre of the board.  At the end of any turn a side had at least one mech or vehicle in the square they would get 100 points. If they were the only player to have anything there then they would get 200 points. At the end of four turns, whoever had the most points would win.

Here's my stuff. I've forgotten what I had. A couple of things with Hawk on the end. Some tanks. A VTOL. The big one is an Atlas. Beyond that? Nah.

Ed and I used our speediest things to get a presence in the square on the first turn. Everyone else advanced close and moved into firing positions.

There was lots of firing. My VTOL was the first casualty. But I ended the turn with a light mech in the square, so got to download a couple of albums.

Things began to hot up in teh square. Daniel was my immediate opponent. He had a small squad of skilled mechs and some meaty tanks. The tanks went in for teh downloads and the mechs provided fire support. I just kept feeding things into the square as quickly as I could.

Some action on the other side. It's hard to tell who has what. Daniel and Craig brought their own toys, so they could be identified. But Ed, Frank and I just used Ed's models which are a mix of three colours but with all of us having units of each one. We remembered whose models were whose but it makes for confusing photos. 

Anyway, here's Ed's forces taking on Craig's stuff. I think the yellow mech in the distance is one of Frank's.

Because being in teh square was better than not being in teh square teh fighting got very up-close and personal. Craig kept forgetting that his light mechs were fire-support ones and had no short-range capability. At least twice he ran them into the rear of an enemy only to find he'd gone too close and couldn't shoot.

It was really serious in my corner of teh square. We were all shooting and frantically downloading and I don't remember how anyone else was doing but I was running out of kit.

However I stuck it out to the end.

It was obvious from the first turn that no-one was ever going to have undisputed control of teh square. And that it was unlikely that a single player would have all of their in-square assets knocked out at any point. So it boiled down to which players had had stuff there for the most turns. Ed and I drew for first place, with 400 points - our early game dropping off of fast light assets paid off there. Daniel and Frank were a turn behind us so got 300 points. Craig had lots of fun shooting people up, but seems to have forgotten the objective and scored 200 points (I think).

So it was possibly a flawed scenario, but it gave a fun game, and I think we worked out an alternative version with more scope for movement, albeit with more of an element of luck.

Thanks to Ed for setting everything up!

Heat - 1961 Championship

 Last year Mrs Kobold and I did an epic boardgame campaign playing through all of the stages of the 2024 Tour De France using Flamme Rouge. We haven't done anything like that since then, but the other day we started a smaller championship.

I bought 'Heat: Pedal To The Metal' just after Christmas, but haven't posted about it here before. It's a motor-racing game from the same people that did Flamme Rouge, and has some of the same DNA. Indeed boardgame forums often have 'Heat or Flamme Rouge?' discussions started by people who think you can only have one race game.

Like Flamme Rouge, Heat uses cards selected from your hand for movement. However in Heat you may select more than one; your car is in gear from 1-4 and you have to play a number of cars equal to your current gear. Standard cards run from 1-4, so you could go a basic 1-16 spaces each turn. Obviously deciding what gear to be in is part of the game. Gear 4 is great on straights, but on corners there is a maximum safe speed and you may need to drop down a gear or two in order to reduce the number of cards you have to play.

However that's just the basics. The core of the game is the Heat Cards (hence the name). These are part of your movement deck, but start in the engine area of your player board. You can spend Heat  to do various things - bonus movement, go round corners faster, play some special cards etc. The played Heat Card goes from your engine to the discard pile. Heat can only be spent from your engine, so you need to get the cards back there to keep racing. From the discard pile they will be shuffled into your deck, when it runs out. From the deck they will make it into your hand. Having Heat in your hand is bad, as you can't use the cards from there and they take up space that should be occupied by movement cards. However certain things (mostly being in low gear) give you cooldown actions, and these can be used to remove one or more Heat Cards from your hand and put them back into the engine.

Careful choices have to be made with your hand and what gear to be in to ensure that there's a steady flow of heat back into the engine, so your car can keep pushing its limits and stay in contention.

Additional rules add upgrades to vehicles (better tyres, cooling systems, tougher or more streamlined bodies and so forth). These take the form of special movement cards, so planning your hand so that you have them when you most need them helps. 

The game comes with four fixed tracks, but the optional weather and track rules affect various track conditions giving you some variety. 

The rules also have rules for bot racers (using a neat card-based system I won't bore you with aside from saying that ... it's neat) and, of interest here, championships. 

The game includes three championships, for 1961, 1962 and 1963. Two have three races and one has four. Yes, like Flamme Rouge the game has a period aesthetic, opting for the early 1960s.

So with a few games under our belt and despite Catherine still struggling to remember the lengthy but logical turn-sequence, we decided to embark on the basic 1961 championship. The first race is on teh Great Britain track, which looks like this:

As you can see, the game uses lovely little racing car models. Mine is blue and Catherine's is yellow. I got a good starting grid position and used some early Heat to stay at the front. The bots run a tight race and you can't afford to let your guard down!

Into a tight series of bends. I held the lead but I was low on heat now. I hoped to get some back on teh second part of the bends, but failed. And because of the track/weather conditions there was no cooldown available on the long straight section that made up a lot of the course. Catherine ran a more cautious race.

The race is two laps of the board. Here we are starting the second lap; I was now in second place but still running well, all things considered.

Through the bends again and things started to go wrong. I managed to use a cooling system upgrade to get some heat cards back, but misjudged a corner and ended up slightly further back than I'd hoped. This meant I took longer finishing the bends than I wanted and had to spend all of my heat cards to stay in place as I did so. 

A strong finish really needs some extra heat in your hand; some to crank up to 4th gear off the final corner and some to give yourself a boost on the last move. I could do neither and saw the bots overtake me. I finished fourth. 

Catherine dropped short of the finish line on one turn, and then saw a hand full of heat cards on the next force her to cross in low gear. The silver car behind her crossed faster - in the case of cars crossing the finish line on the same turn the winner is the one that gets furthest past, and bots don't make mistakes. Catherine was pipped into 6th place by her overheating engine.

Green won, followed by black and red. The random nature of bots means all three could finish poorly in the next race, although they will get pole position in the next one.

So not a great performance by either of us. Catherine doesn't take chances and therefore gets outrun by the bots. I took chances but still haven't mastered some of the nuances of the hand management so it all fell apart for me at the end. We'll see how we do when the championship moves to the next race, in the USA.

Mephisto (Again)

Last week we had a few days up in Brisbane. One of the entries on my list of Things To Do was to go to the Queensland Museum and see the only surviving German WW1 A7V tank, Mephisto, in its 'natural habitat'. Several years ago I got to see it in Canberra, where it had been loaned to the War Memorial, nominally for the centenary of WW1, but apparently mostly because the gallery in which it was displayed in Queensland had flooded, damaging the tank. 

Anyway, here it is in all it's glory in a new gallery built especially for it. My thinks to the lovely museum guide who not only took a couple of pictures of me next to the tank, but took some time out to chat about it as well.

Here's my younger offspring, Fraser, posing next to it for scale.

Rear view. It has six machine-guns pointing in all directions but the front. The front has a 6pdr gun.

In Front Of The Tank Selfie.

More loot. Australians were apparently very adept at looting German equipment, and brought loads of it back here. A special unit existed to distribute the trophies to towns and communities across the country, which is partially why so many of our RSLs have various pieces of artillery outside them.

At the top of the standard German MG08 machine0gun. Below it is the world's first dedicated anti-tank weapon - a German anti-tank rifle.

A trench-mortar. Apparently a lot of these found their way Down Under.

Back to Mephisto.

Mephisto scaled with a 5' 8" ageing transvestite who is on holiday.

Rear-view of the tank. That round plate under the angle is the escape-hatch.

And that's enough photos of the tank.

We did other stuff in the museum as well. My favourite was this horribly life-like and life-sized model of the extinct monitor lizard Megalania. Once again Fraser is there to provide scale, but so is my grandson, who very much likes to see dinosaurs and such-like.
 

Second best thing of the holiday was Bluey's World. I'll spare you the photos.

Chariots At MOAB (Again)

Last year I headed up to MOAB to help Victor playtest a chariot-racing game he is working on. THis year I did it again.

You can read about the game in that link above or, at least, the version of it that we were playing last year. Victor has made a few changes since then, the biggest of which is that a lot of tests are now made on two dice, with adjustments upgrading or downgrading what type of dice you roll.

After sorting out our teams, what skills they'd have and what types of horses, we diced for initial positions off the start line. I'm Red. The ones at the back.

Frank with the Blue team got a good start, but the game does depend on your colour coming out of the initiative bag on the straight sections, and Blue just didn't appear for the first couple of laps.

I got some early moves and used my better chariot to come up and cause trouble. Alistair, with Green, had slipped his fast controllable horse teams into the inside lane and was planning on racing from there.  I rammed him, causing some damage which I hoped would cause him issues later.

I also brought on my Hortator to guide mt chariots through the dust, but he didn't really need to do much. Beside him you can see my Spartator as well. His job was to throw water onto the chariots or teams to cool them down. He risked being run down by other chariots. Mine was.

You can see two Spartators in action here and, in the background, the grid showing what dice have been drawn so far.

Craig brought one of his White team chariots to the fore. My second Red chariot was starting to drop back. I would have to spend some actions to keep it properly in the race.

A view from the rear. You can see Green doggedly holding the inside lane. No chariots had been lost, so it was hard for the rear-markers to find spaces to try and break into.

The grid, showing that we'd completed four of the seven laps.

Green made their run for the front. The middle lane is the best lane when it comes to adjudicating finishes, so getting to the front of it is a good place to be.

With one and a bit laps to go I got a couple of opportunities and used them to bring my second chariot - the one that had been running a safe race in the rear - down the inside track, and to then cut across in front of Blue.

I was then able to cut back to the inside lane, but couldn't get the actions to use that position to push in front of Green. However I was in a  decent finishing position, with a horse team that was fast on the finish.

Craig pulled into the outside lane as we finished the final straight. All three lead positions were occupied, so it would be a photo-finish. This involved a dice-off, with the modifiers to types of dice rolled being based on teh traits of teh horse teams, how blown they were and which lane the chariot was in. Alistair was strong in teh centre rolling 2D12s, I was rolling D10s on teh inside and Craig D6s on teh outside.

And yet it was Craig's 8 that beat my 6 and Alistair's 7 to give the White team and unexpected win. I had to be content with third place. 

There was plenty of discussion afterwards of things that could be changed. We felt that chariots didn't really seem that vulnerable; we expected a a couple of crashes but in fact every chariot finished. We considered some changes to increase the damage chariots took for certain things. The multiple dice types worked OK, but possibly slowed the game down, firstly because we didn't have enough of them so we were passing them around to each other but also because you couldn't roll the dice and then see if you needed to work out the modifiers afterwards (sometimes you know you've passed or failed without having to do the calculations). With varying dice types you need to do the calculations in order to determine what you're actually rolling. We also considered rules for bringing back the Spartator if he got killed on the assumption that a team would probably have a few of them on hand.

Anyway, it was a fun game with an spectacularly close finish.

As ever I hit what was left of the Bring & Buy (Monday at MOAB is pretty quiet) and picked up yet another boardgame.

'On The Origin Of Species' is from the same publisher that does 'First in Flight' - they seem to specialise in games with a science education theme - and is, oddly enough, not about evolution, despite the name. It is, however, about the groundwork of Darwin's magnum opus, with the players taking the part of naturalists discovering and documenting species in the Galapagos Islands. The art-work is lovely, but I haven't had chance to play it through yet. I'm hoping to fit in a game one evening this week.

The Adventures Of Harvey Knight - 6

It's been a couple of weeks since I had my WW2 coastal forces out (some of which is due to my having been on holiday - a fairly valid excuse). 

Today I played the next scenario in my campaign following the career of Lt Cdr Harvey Knight. 

After five missions to intercept convoys (with varying degrees of success), the SNO decided to give Harvey a different assignment, and he was tasked with landing an agent on the Dutch coast. Along with his own MTB 413 Knight selected he two MGBs to accompany him - MGB 91 under Lt Dean and MGB 103 under Lt McDonald. In order to allow Knight to engage any large escorts with his torpedoes the agent was entrusted to Lt McDonald.

They quickly approached the coast, avoiding the minefields intelligence said were there, and McDonald headed towards the landing point. A shell-splash off his stern showed that a German patrol had spotted them, and that they had a big ship with a big gun - a Verpostenboot with an 88mm.

Knight brought MTB 413 in fast and unleashed his torpedoes.

The escort was sunk.

The second escort - an R-boat - closed rapidly with McDonald's boat, but its crew was sent diving for cover by some accurate fire from the British vessel.

The tenacious German continued to close and kept McDonald's boat under fire, but seemed unable to inflict any damage.

The other two boats closed up to support McDonald, who was now landing the agent.

Things were getting very tight indeed; a lapse of concentration on the part of any boat would see a collision.

The bold German started to take damage but kept firing. The agent was quickly landed, but the German might still spot them ending the mission.

McDonald began to lay smoke to cover the agent, but Dean was the hero of the hour; accurate fire from his crew saw the German boat explode.

The three British boats headed for home, with no damage and two sunk escorts to their credit, as well as an agent successfully landed.

They encountered no surprises on the way home. Knight's reputation increased off the back of this flawless mission, and the crews at the base rose to the occasion by repairing the damage from previous missions on all of his boats.

Harvey Knight's reputation is now at 4, so he's eligible for a medal. All of his boats are fighting fit and are at least competent. Things are going well for our hero.