More Engaging

It was Star Trek night again at the Berkeley Vale club last night. We played through a couple of scenarios. In the first a Federation task group was dispatched to rescue a team of research scientists on a disabled science vessel, whilst the Klingons sought to grab them for themselves. A short battle this one, with the Feds beaming off one team only to have the rescuing ship destroyed, then the second team nabbed by the Klingons - only for Alan to blast the Klingon ship that carried them to atoms (his special orders were to ensure that no scientists were left in Klingon hands, and in this he was ruthlessly effective!)

The second battle was a slugfest with the simple aim to give the other side a darned good kicking, and to practice more with the rules. Great fun, and interesting to see tactics developing (especially the use of warp drive for hit and run attacks), as well as a growing appreciation for why damage control and shifting power is something to think about.

I'm really enjoying "Engage". its such a simple set of rules to play, but its simplicity belies a finesse that allows many variations in play and ship design, and it really captures the Star Trek feel very nicely As usual we've identified a few modifications and house rules that we think will make it work even better for us and which better reflect some of the aspects of the TV and film episodes, including changes to the rules for teleports and transporters (both ships should have shields lowered), restricted firing arcs for torpedoes, allowing rear firing weapons and tighter arcs needed to gain the shooting bonus for firing at the targets rear. With luck we'll give those mods a spin in a couple of weeks.

Engage!

Just back from the Berkeley Vale club at the local pub where we've been giving "Engage" from Red Wyvern games a run through. I picked up a copy at Blast Tastic earlier in the month after having a quick play against the designers. Tonight's game was the first proper outing with the club

My original plan was to break out my old collection of FASA Star Trek models but unfortunately the upheaval caused by various bouts of building and other works at home meant I couldn't extract the models I needed, so instead we used a whole heap of Star Trek micro machines.

There was no particular scenario, just a "training exercise" featuring a collection of Federation and Klingon ships, the Feds eventually claiming a narrow victory as the last Klingon Vor'Cha blew up. being typical wargamers the emphasis was on "shoot, shoot and shoot", whereas sometimes reallocating power to reinforce the shields, or conducting damage control might have been a good idea, but to be honest that was no surprise :)

We found the rules to be quite a bit of fun, very simple and straightforward to play but with plenty of scope for added detail with the various optional and extra rules, and also simple enough to be house-ruled if necessary (for example the chaps didn't like the initiative rules so we may use a random draw to determine the order of ship activations). the best bit of feedback though was a resounding "more please", so I'll be looking to put together some more interesting scenarios in the coming weeks. All in all a very nice set of rules.

Stormbirds

In another classic example of "drift" the latest completions here at the Cambridge Shipyards  are a trio of Romulan D-7 Stormbirds. Again, finishing off a project from several years ago. I had a pile of the Konami (or were they Furuta? probably Furuta) large-ish Star Trek models wherein it was curious that they never released a Klingon D-7. Or if they did I never saw it. Anyway a US company (Johnny Lightning?) produced a D7 whhich was slightly too small but which looked great with the Japanese models anyway so I bought a squadron of those, and then decided to get another three and paint them up as Rom birds. Of course this was a project that stalled and the models languished in a box for a few years. A happy coincidence of watching the fan-made Star Trek: Phase II episodes on Youtube (they really are rather good) and digging out the box of models promoted them to "top of the list" just to get them finished.

I probably rushed them and the detailing isn't as good as it could be, so I may well end up giving them some additional paintwork in the future, but for now I'm very pleased with the way that these ships came out.

And, after all, the D-7 really is a lovely design. Much more businesslike that that namby pamby Federation stuff :)