Double Rogue Stars

At the tail end of February Gus, Phil, Andy, and Richard P came over to Stately Counterpane Manor for a first go at Rogue Stars. 

Rogue Stars as published is very much a two-player game. The initiative system is fun and great at keeping both players involved in the action all of the time but it won't easily work with three or four players. Although the online FAQ suggests a solution, I didn't want to risk my players' first experience of the game being spoiled by this not working properly.

So I set up two boards so we could do two one-on-one games in parallel. My old length of Pavis city wall formed a handy barrier between the two.

One of the boards was the starport - a chance to use my homemade shuttle craft.

Andy ran a street gang (the Undercity Hivers) trying to smuggle three crates of contraband across the starport while Gus was in charge of the Okh - kind of police-for-hire; in my mind vaguely based on the Judoon from Doctor Who.

The other board was a wasteland area that had been used to set up a hazardous chemical storage facility.

We used the Get to the Ship scenario on this board but the "ship" was replaced by a Stargate. This was the first time I've used the model that came as a souvenir of a long-ago Berkeley Hordes of the Things tournament.

In this game Phil took on the role of Commisar Lukan...

I based her on the evil Servalan from Blakes 7 and gave her a squad of fairly unimpressive soldiers (who happened to be named after prominent military historians but that's a side issue) as well as a fairly chunky combat robot. Apart from the robot, all of this squad were figures from the original 1970s Gamma World Adventurers box by Grenadier Miniatures.

Richard ran the crew of the Free Trader Gilgamesh; a squad made up of a mix of various miniatures. It was this group that had the task of escaping via the Stargate. They also had a military robot...

On the Starport side, Andy quickly managed to get Eloise (his machine-gun-armed-military-veteran pilot) into an overwatch position on top of the Starport Security building. Having an army-surplus jump pack helped with this!

Meanwhile the rest of the crew set off with their grav-sleds of dodgy merchandise.

The first shot of the game saw Sergeant Gnaar, the Okh leader, caught in a hail of machine-gun bullets and put out-of-action. This was a taste of things to come. Gus was unfortunate to lose another officer to the streetgang's firepower and was always chasing the game after that.

I saw less of the wasteland game as Richard was reasonably familiar with the rules so less guidance was needed from me. Above we see Troopers Glantz and Erickson taking cover behind a rock spire.

Phil/Commisar Lukan was successful in this game. In Richard's words, "Well and truly stuffed me with some excellent dice!"

The back-and-forth nature of the game was appreciated by the players and we plan to have another go in March. Since the game, Phil has bought a copy of the rules and he and Richard are both working on building squads based on figures they own. Rogue Stars is great that way - you can use pretty much any figures you have to hand.

For these first games I had set up the forces such that we avoided using some of the rules - tactical doctrines, grenades, and psionic were all off the table (see what I did there?)  I suspect for the next game I'm going to come under pressure to use the full rules.