Tuesday, July 14, 2020

The Last Hills

On Sunday we played our first test-game-of-Future-War-Commander-by-Skype. I'd created a scenario based in a Frank Chadwick article in the Journal of the Traveller's Aid Society about forty years ago!

Gus and John commanded elements of the armed forces of LSP (Pynchan) Inc - the corporate government a planet in the Third Imperium (the setting of the Traveller RPG).  Andy and Mark represented to revolutionaries closing in on the capital and on the verge of winning the planet-wide civil war.

As so often with these games, I was too busy trying to keep things moving to take photographs but here are a few.

I set the table up as a desert area with a small settlement and artificially irrigated fields in the centre. There were a few low ridges (marked by lines of gravel), a steep hill, and a steep-sided gully. 


The game was fairly slow as we were feeling our way into the rules.  I think we managed about three turns in four hours. 

Inevitably the built-up area was the focus of the fighting. Below we can see mercenary infantry passing the condenser unit adjacent to the crop-fields. 


The rebels' light combat walkers proved to be unfortunately vulnerable to fire from the government's relatively low-tech tracked tanks...


The picture below shows Government infantry at the front edge of the village.  At that point they had just destroyed a rebel recce unit which had got too close.


I'd made sure I gave all of the players two HQ units and the Government side had a Forward Air Controller. Of course both sides had a CO too. The opinion of the players was that the game had been slow as a result.

We're going to give the system another go, probably with smaller forces. 

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