This Far, No Further

Happy Veterans Day to all my fellow Vets. The work on My Warlord goes slowly now that I am in the painting stage. So many small pipes, and I haven't even gotten to the gold trim. Which I know is going to...challenge my persistence. New Pics next week.

I recently played a four player Star trek Attack Wing mission, First Contact. Each player brings a 120 point squadron and together they must stop the Borg Cube, which is run by a deck of cards.

I brought three Federation heavies, Enterprise E, Thunderchild, and Prometheus. There was another Fed player (Defiant, Hood, and Yeager), a Klingon (3x Vor'Cha) and a Romulan (3x Reman Warbirds).

The Borg attacks can be devastating. Normally it will make four attacks, one each at the closest ships.  The attack strength is determined by the action card that is drawn for the Cube each turn, usually between 6-8, with a 10 in there for fun. Some cards change up who gets attacked, and sometimes everyone get attacked. Once the Cube's shields are knocked down the Borg Sphere is launched and heads toward the edge of the table. If it exits the players all lose, as history is changed and all is Borg.

We did really well. That is, until we lost four ships in one turn. The Sphere was stopped short of the map edge, but all the Romulans went with it. All three Klingon ships went out in a blaze of point-blank glory, but did a huge amount of damage.

It came down to the wire. On the second to last turn, the Hood, Defiant, and the last Klingon were blown away, and the Prometheus reduced to two hull points. Good dice favored me next turn and the Enterprise did just enough damage to finish off the Cube.

It is a fun mission, but I feel it could use some tweaks. Like the Borg Cube doesn't move at all, and a bit more variety in who it attacks, and maybe some special attacks as well. I'll write up a revised mission and post it here later.

Go Roll Some Dice

And Don't Forget When You Are Cloaked

Showdown at DS9

On the night before Comic Con what should you do? Check the schedule? Wait in line for hall "H"?

No! It's time to drink rum and play games! Fellow Warlord Pete was in town for the con and hanging out at Fortress Blackheart, so we decided to play a epic 250 point Star Trek Attack Wing battle.

Destroy the station was the mission, and to give us more maneuver room we played on a 4'x 6' battlefield.

250 points is getting close to the upper limit of an Attack Wing game, purely due to large number of cards and tokens to keep track of. Actual game time did not increase by that much, a testament to the cleanness of the FlightPath system.

Pete took five solid ships chock full of upgrades, and a well equipped DS9.

I didn't take two Jem'Hadar battleships, but I did really think about it. My fleet consisted of the Jem'hadar Battlecruiser, 4 attack ships, a Keldon, a Galor, the Hediki fighters, and a Breen Cruiser to round out the Dominion multicultural Battle Fleet of Doom. It took two turns to get into phaser range, but the fireworks was worth it.

The battle raged hot for two more turns, but Pete's ship were unable to support each other well and couldn't finish off cripples. The end result was all my ship took a good amount of damage, but I only lost three. Four out five Federation ships were destroyed. The end came swiftly for DS9 as the Dominion fleet closed in around it.

The the sole surviving Federation ship, Defiant, took out the Breen Cruiser, but it wasn't enough to save DS9 from a torrent of fire.

It was a very enjoyable game and went smoothly. The only complaint that both of us had was DS9 was not tough enough. It needs some additional special rules to give it some more bite. One thing we are going to try out is having DS9 be able to always fire its primary weapon in addition to any torpedoes it fires, at the same or a different target.  

Go Roll Some Dice

For the Founders!

Da Borgs

The big cyber-zombie baddies are here for Star Trek Attack Wing. And they don't disappoint. So we gave them a test drive. One Borg Sphere o' Fear fully equipped came to a cool 80 points. I took a firepower heavy Fed fleet. It was almost close.

The Borg do come with a slew of special rules, all fit well into the game without bogging down at all. The Captains have a neat system where they start with a number of drones, 4 for the 3 point Captain and 1 for the 0 point one. Your Captain level is equal to the number of drone tokens on the Captain's cards. The Drones can be spent for attack re-rolls and the Assimilation action card in this set, I'm sure more fun ways to spend drones are coming.

The Borg Sphere moves in a novel way: No turns. You may only change direction by 90 or 180 degrees by the Spin maneuver; you rotate the ship 90 or 180 then make your move with the straight template. Nice and easy, but makes for interesting play.

Sphere 4270 is 40 points of evil. Attack 6, Shields and hull 7. No evade. Target lock, scan and regenerate for actions.

Rule one when fighting the Borg, do not let them get to range one if they have a tractor beam, or FSM help you, a tractor beam and a cutting beam. Yes of course I made that mistake. The Nebula was turned into a cloud of plasma in one turn. Sigh. Let's talk about the highlights of the upgrade cards.

The Borg Tractor Beam is an action at range one, the victim gets two shields disabled and if cloaked, immediately un-cloaks and raises it's shields minus two. Then if the target ship is still alive, next turn it can only pick a 1 or 2 maneuver. 7 Points

The Cutting Beam: Range one attack. 10 dice. The Borg has to have the target in a Borg Tractor Beam, and then the card is disabled. 8 points.

Ablative Hull Armor:10 points, absorbs 4 damage cards before being discarded.

Feedback Pulse: A nasty dirty trick for 8 points. You declare you are using it before any dice are rolled, then half the hits are put on the firing ship, you take no hits and get an Aux Power marker.

Assimilation Tubules: 8 point action. Range 1-2 and costs one Drone. You get to steal a crew, equipment, or weapon upgrade. Fun times.  

Seven of Nine: 4 point Crew, disable to gain 2 drones, up to your max.

The Borg are good addition for Attack Wing, I look forward to the Tactical Cube in June, that should be a hell of a thing.

Go Roll some Crits

Resistance is Fun!

Multiple Warp Signatures

Star Trek Attack Wing is speeding up their release schedule. With the some new (non-Heroclix) sculpts in the line-up and a re-do of the Klingon Bird of Prey I do hope that the older Heroclix Enterprise A & E get a new model as well. I'm not going to hold my breath though. Not very many ships left for them to do, I would love to see an Federation Akira class (from First Contact and some DS9) and a bigger Borg Cube without the armor plates. But that's just me.

It will be interesting to see how much the Borg shake things up. They had better keep the Borg as a really hard to kill, but few in number kind of force. I will be covering the Wizkid's Borg Organized Play Events starting in June, should be fun.

Now if they would just release some faction booster packs with some new crew and equipment cards and a couple of new named ships I would be very happy indeed.

Go Roll Some Dice

And make docking space

Shields Up!

While we wait for the new Tyranid Codex to arrive, let's talk about a different game, Star Trek Attack Wing. It has been a while since the two big sci-fi franchises have had a good space combat game. Star Wars got theirs in the form of the excellent "X-Wing" by Fantasy Flight, and Star Trek got "Star Trek Tactics" by Wizkids, based on the Heroclix system.  

I am big fan of Fantasy Flight's X-Wing game and was really disappointed in Wizkids' terrible Star Trek Tactics. Fortunately Wizkids had a smart attack and licensed X-Wing's "Flight Path" game system for another try at a Star Trek game. It was a great fit and what we got is a fun and fast playing Star Trek starship combat game.

The smart attack didn't cover everything. Instead of making a few new sculpts for ships that really needed it, they just re-used the Heroclix models. In some cases, like the Romulans and the Dominion fleets, they are fine and the paint jobs are serviceable. The Federation ships are nice models with okay paint jobs. It's just too bad they went went with light blue instead of grey. The hack job they did on the Klingons we cover next time.

The most visible problem is that of scale. The (in)famous Bird of Prey is a fine model, just far too big next to the other ships. The Enterprise from the original series is in scale with the Enterprise-D, just not anything else. I don't want perfect scaling here (like X-wing did) but just some relative scale would have been great.

Enough with negative side. Star Trek Attack Wing is a lot of fun to play. It is obviously similar to X-Wing, but there are lots of minor tweaks that give it it's own flavor. The average game will take between 45-90 minutes to play out. One of the things that Attack Wing does better that its sibling is each ship expansion comes with a mission card, so is there is good variety if you don't feel like the 100 point line up and kill.

We will be giving this game a lot of coverage this year, starting next week with my Klingon fleet repaint.

Go Roll Some Dice
In Spaaaace