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Thursday, October 29, 2009

The First Game Night

This is Steven Petrick posting.

Last night SVC inaugurated "Game Night", essentially we at ADB, inc, are going to try to spend some time playing other games than our own to try to maintain a feel for the pulse of the game industry. We will try to do this every Wednesday.

For the first game SVC chose Space Hulk from the Warhammer 40K universe. SVC created his own scenario, taking the Genestealers, and assigning my five man space Marine team a mission to simply "scan" three rooms. I was briefed only as much about the rules as SVC thought it absolutely necessary for me to know in order to get started, and enough background of previous encounters with the Genestealers to let me know that "hand-to-hand combat is very bad".

SVC then made a conscious decision to play the Genestealers somewhat stupidly in order to make up for the fact that he had decided to use all of the Genestealers available to attack. The only thing being that they essentially came in small groups.

I opted to essentially take up a defensive position in the first room I entered (selected specifically because it allowed only two lanes of attack, two of the rooms did this, the third allowed three lanes of attack), and essentially destroyed the Genestealers with long range fire for a bit. This reduced their numbers quite a bit, but ran my one heavy weapon (a kind of gatling gun) out of ammunition.

At that point, SVC had the surviving Genestealers essentially adopt what seemed the optimum strategy (at least against the team of Marines I had. Essentially they stacked up in the other two rooms that I had to enter, and waited for me behind the closed doors. At that point, I was down to just four men. (The fifth man who had the gatling gun was only able to engage in hand-to-hand, so I sent him "home" . . . actually posted him so that he could watch for any Genestealers sneaking up behind me, but still be able to run off the board to safety.)

Due to the depletion of Genestealer numbers, my four remaining men were able to accomplish the mission, but I failed to completely avoid coming to hand-to-hand (the Genestealers had no distance weapons, but being able to choose when to open a door and charge to close quarters largely negated that, with greater numbers that would have been overpowering). The result was a loss of two men out of the team (40% casualties overall), but the mission was accomplished. In all seriousness, I would have retreated after the first casualty (effectively 25% of my strength at that point with the gatling man being out of the fight), but both casualties (effectively 50% of my combat power at that point) and the destruction of the last Genestealer in the brood happened too close together for me to initiate such an action.

SVC did make a few other modifications to help balance his scenario, the key one being to allow me a standard five command points (essentially five extra moves) rather than a random number up to six, and that did greatly help my ability to move.

I am not sure how Space Hulk works (SVC briefly discussed the capabilities of some of the space Marines he did not let me use, and some of them would make massing Genestealers in one room problematic), but there are very odd and strict limits on movement that make it very hard to operate how troops actually would (and real disconnects, i.e., the passage ways are all too narrow for two Marines to deploy side by side or both be able to fire down a hallway, but somehow wide enough to swing a battle axe?).