A Headless Body Production
Note: Inappropriate capitalization is used to highlight specific rules or keywords to the game.
Engagement Near Mücke, the town, or the gunboat?
Red dice represent rolls by the Martian.
The Board:
Off of the bank of the river Ohm was a series of entrenchments designed to provide resistance <ba-dum-pow!> to the Martian should they try to advance along it's banks. The gunboat Mücke lies burning in the water, it's crew attempting to put out the flames.
I attempted to use the terrain rules in the book, but the board was too cluttered. So I removed a few pieces.
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| Overall Martian Deployment. First time on the table for most of the figures. |
The Martians are organized in 3 triads. 2 each of one Assault, one Slaver and one Raider. And a few groups of Assault Drones. This is the first game with Marvin v2.0. K-9 is a Repair Drone assigned to Marvin. For more on Marvin, see here...
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| And one group of just Raiders. |
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| A reinforced squad is to the left of the entrenchments. |
A Squad is 3 elements. This one has a MG section assigned.
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| There are two platoons of infantry on the board. They meet in the middle of the entrenchments. |
Backed by Mortars and guns.
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| The far right has two more reinforced squads. |
Additionally, two platoons of panzers are off board.
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| The game has units moving alternatively For the Martians, a single tripod is a unit. But the Raiders have a special rule that if any tripod in their triad activates, all the raiders can activate. |
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| But due to terrain visibility and movement rates, the Martian forces remain out of site or range of the defending humans. |
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| The view from the Martian side of the board. |
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| The Raider triad advances and manages to bring their double firing blasters to bear. But they only eliminated just one element from the Squad defending the German left. |
Then fortune favored the Germans. Between MG's and rockets and newly brought on panzers, a Raider is blown up, the blast wave catching another, tipping it over. The remaining Raider is raked by an 5.7cm tank round, jostling the pilot (shock) and lightly damaging it.
A note on blast radius on exploding tripods. In general it is described "within 4" from the destroyed tripod. and does damage (1 or 2 or 3 hits) commensurate with the tripod size. However we have not found exactly how to measure the blast range. Do we measure from the center of the model, or the closest point?
In the above example the disks are 3.5" in diameter. And they were touching, so it was clear that "Flip me over!" was in the blast radius. But the damaged tripod was within 4" of the closest point of the exploding tripod, but not within 4" of the center of the blast.
A note here that the bases here are not official "Return of the Tripod" game rules, but are mounted for ease of movement, and provide structural support for the figures.
The problem is scaling with the definition.
If from the center of the model, then for Slavers, the explosion extends just 1.5” from the circumference of the base.
If from the center of the model, then for Assault Tripods, the explosion extends just ½ inch from the edge.
However, if you measure the 4" from the nearest point of the tripod, then an Assault tripod will cover about 180 square inches. If from the center of the Tripod, you have what Marvin would describe as, "Where's the kaboom? There was supposed to be an Earth-shattering kaboom!" Inconveniencing no one.
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| Back to the game. The Drones have reached the creek. Which we decided was half movement for 1". So just an annoying slow point. Several drones were damaged in the crossing. |
We then had a conversation about drone morale checks. We decided that since they had a morale rating, they do make morale checks. Where we errored was that we counted the need for a morale check on a unit by unit basis. But have been corrected since.
For any element/model that with more than one structure point, the conditions to cause a morale check is on a model by model basis.
In the above, Drones have two structure points. A drone with a single hit is not a morale check. A drone with a hit and a shock, or two shocks, does make a morale check.
None of this changed anything in the game.
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| German panzers advance. One takes a direct hit with a heavy heat ray and explodes. |
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| The terrain is ambulatory in our games :) |
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| It is only turn 3, but our clock is running is running down. But we had to get some of the damage in from the Martians. Their raider advances, pelting a squad with support from Marvin and a slaver. But is in turn destroyed by 7.7cm howitzers. |
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| A bored Major Patton is writing future motivational speeches. |
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| The crew of the Mücke give up their efforts at fire fighting and abandon ship. |
The thought of having some messages on destroyed tripod bases struck my fancy. But when the first one was destroyed, it was carefully picked up and placed flat on a nearby surface. Defeating the joke.
Finally one was flipped over. Then others investigated, to the comment of, "It's like fortune cookies."
Notes after the game:
The players here all had experience with the original game. Two of us also beta tested the new version a couple of times. But this is the first game otherwise.
The force mix would have been OK in the old game, but too many units for a 3 hour game in the new version.
The number of units was too many. With the old version, you could activate all your troops in about 10-15 minutes, half hour for a turn, and complete the game with 6-7 turns in an evening.
Switching back and forth takes longer. We did have a lot of that was kibitzing, but even if we managed to get 5 turns in, the Martian is not going to come to grips against the defenses. They need the drones to act as skirmishers and cannon fodder, and the drones cannot come to grips in less than 4 turns.
To speed this up we will need fewer forces on the table.
Possibly a pregame turn where the Drones get a double move. Also incorporating the Sniper and bombardier drones with ranges over 24 inches.
And less terrain.
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