Crisis Point V - Saturday Report

It's now Wednesday and I finally have time to report back on Crisis Point V at the weekend.  I have to say I'm incredibly pleased with how it went.

For those of you who haven't been paying attention, Crisis Point is the once-a-year wargames event first organised in 2012.  I wanted to bring trade to the village and I thought we could probably raise some money for charity along the way.  Mainly, though, I hoped that Crisis Point would create a community of gamers whose creativity and enthusiasm would be greater than the sum of its parts.  In all of these respects the event's been a real success.

This year there were some deliberate changes from previous years.  For the first time we aimed to play lots of short games.  We had a definite aim of finishing Saturday's games on Saturday and planning Sunday's games on Saturday evening.  We also had, for the first time, multiple different rules sets in use; three being the simultaneous maximum.

On Saturday morning there were three games.  I ran a game of Pulp Alley.  This used my dungeon terrain to represent the tunnels beneath Castle Myelikvis in Andreivia.

Developed from an idea by Rob Connolly, the scenario involved agents of MI6 (Benedict Sharrock) and Russian Military Intelligence (GRU, Phil Gray) trying to recover a vital piece of computer hardware from Andreivian Intelligence (Jamie Crawley).

Sadly there are hardly any photos as I was too busy running the game, which finished with the Andreivian agents still in possession of the vital "Slicer" hardware.

The Slicer was needed to decrypt reconnaissance images stored in a KH11 spy satellite recently misplaced by the American NSA.  The KH11 was the objective of an Arc of Fire game run by Richard Phillips on the adjacent, much larger, table.  I rather stuck Richard with the job of running this, umpiring Arc of Fire for the first time.  He did a sterling job as far as I could see.

Somewhere in the eastern hills of Andreivia Russian and NATO troops were converging on the area where the satellite was thought to have landed.  A group of Mujaheddin holding the nearby village knew exactly where the satellite had landed, if not exactly how valuable its contents were.  Finally, a unit of the Andreivian Army would arrive, somewhat delayed, to also contest possession of the prize.

Meanwhile, on the third table, Mark Kniveton put on a large game of Force on Force.  Sadly, I have very few pics of this but I'm very pleased with how thoroughly Mark got into the spirit of the Andreivian setting.

After the Pulp Alley game had finished I ran a second game, this time a small game of Arc of Fire.  This was based on a scene from the film Full Metal Jacket. It involved a suicidal attack (by Andreivian Armenians, not Viet Cong) on the gates of a military base (Dvimin Military Academy, not Da Nang).  This game was one I'd planned for some time but I had to rearrange the sides when the Andreivia Matrix Game saw the Italian NATO contingent take over the base a week or so before Crisis Point!

Armenian commandos storm the gate and take casualties from their own,
inaccurate mortar support!

This game was great fun.  The attacking Armenians were led into the camp by a BTR-40 APC heavily loaded with explosives.  Benedict, as the Armenian commander, knew the rules under which the explosive would go off but Phil, running the Italians, didn't.

Benedict took out the guards in the look out tower early in the game and some excellent dice rolling saw off the ready guard (Joker's lot in the film) in short order too.  That left the Turks relying on their reserves...

The reserve squad moves up.

In an unexpected twist, Phil managed to capture the BTR 40 and was driving it back towards the attackers when the required combination of cards caused it to explode...

BOOM!

So much for the games on Saturday.  Many thanks to all who participated and to those who brought much sustenance for the hungry gamers.  

That evening we repaired to the Royal Hotel and enjoyed Dave's excellent pies (and a little beer).  We also planned Sunday's games, of which more in the next post....