5150 @ MindSay

I spent the weekend down at the beach house with my brother's family, which includes my "gamer" nephew.

 

We played a couple of games of 5150, him with 6 "Halo" guys (Hard Body armor, Assault Rifles) and me with 6 Spugs (Soft body armor, "Shard Rifle" (bolt action)).  The first thing we decided was that the Spugs sucked. :-)  That's not entirely fair, they just needed to outnumber the Halo guys 2 or 3 to one to have a decent chance against those assault rifles.  In order to level the playing field some (I didn't have any extra figures with me), we added a "Spugnaught" (sort of a mini-mech) and allowed the Spugs to use the Basic reaction chart.  Standard Spug reactions have them advancing like a horde of locusts, and means that a LOT of them will die.  The spugnaught went a long way towards evening the odds, and our last few games were much closer.

 

One of the more fun scenarios we played was a "salvage" scenario where we both were investigating a ruined base looking for unspecified "goodies".  We didn't start off mutually hostile, but once things got hairy, the plasma bolts began to fly. :-)  The setup was this - a number of crates were scattered around the ruins, and you had to open each one to see what was in it:  Alien(1-3), Nothing(4-5) or Something Good (6).  There were also two large shipping "trailer" boxes, which contained 1d6 crates.

 

Two standout moments from that game - My nephew found an alien who ate 2 of his guys before they killed it.  I opened one of those trailers and found 4 aliens (!) who ate 2 of my guys and one of his before getting gunned down.  The other half dozen or so aliens were blown away as soon as they appeared.

 

Oh yeah, and my nephew blew away my Spugnaught with a super-lucky shot right at the end.  Rats! :-)

(For the purist 5150 players out there - yeah, an assault rifle can't actually hurt a BTA, but in this case, I gave him an impact of 1 against my Spugnaut to keep the game going.)

 

The other game we tried out was Warmachine, by Privateer Press.  I've studied up on the game some, but never actually tried to play it before these two games, and of course my Nephew had never even heard of it.  We played a pretty boring scenario (empty table, 24 inches apart, GO!), and while the game has promise, I want to try to play it a little closer to the rules (to keep his interest, I relaxed a lot of the rules) and with some terrain before I make a final judgement.

 

I really like the PP models, especially in their new "Hordes" game, so I want to like the rules, but it really is hard to play any game other than THW games after you've gotten into the reaction mechanism.

Well, MilleniumCon was a mixed bag this year.

 

I thoroughly enjoyed staying with my friends, as did my family.  I really need to get over there more than once a year.

 

The Con itself was, as I said, a mixed bag.  It was great to catch up with a lot of the convention goers I've met over the years.  The two 5150 games I played were sadly lacking though.  It's not the system (which I've played many times), but rather the scenarios.

 

The first one was a huge "battle royale" scenario, and that suffered from the usual problems of a really huge game.  There were too many figures crammed into too tight a spot, and the unique flavor of 5150 was almost completely lost in an almost Warhammer 40k-ish slug fest.  Sigh.

 

The second one suffered only because of a very bad deployment choice.  The best way to describe it is to compare it to another un-fun game I played once, where the enemy was given two mines to place along a road, and the goal of ambushing us.  Well, my opponent put both mines right in my deployment hex, which pretty much ended the game on turn 1.  (Note: it would have been a better game to put the mines half way along the road, so I could get my whole supply train on the board, and he could have actually attacked the column!)

 

The gamemaster really should have called the game after the first round, and reset everything.  It was obvious that we were going to get chewed up and spit out even before the rolling started.  It's a pity, because the scenario really looked like it would have been fun.

 

About the only fun thing that happened in the 5150 games was that the "Monkey" forces (think Planet of the Apes, but smaller) betrayed our alliance and blew up our "Jawas" (Not really Jawas, but similar in size and fondness for salvage and repair).  The one remaining Jawa forged a quick alliance with them, claiming he could hot-wire a spaceship they were trying to steal.

 

I also played in an All Things Zombie game, which was fun as usual.

 

The flea market was as chaotic as you'd expect, but I got an unbelievably fantastic deal on a BUNCH (200+) of figures.  I swear it must be 20lbs of metal!  The box is large enough to actually be hard to lift.

 

I got around 60 Norman knights, 100 Irish warriors, and a few dozen Vikings, Saxons and Norman foot soldiers, all for $50.  When I got home and identified everything, it turned out to be well over $400 worth of stuff!  Holy crap!

 

There are enough Normans in the collection that I can consider converting some of them into Spanish Knights for use with my Andalusians.  I'll need a lot more Norman infantry to do an army, but this is a TREMENDOUS starting point.

 

Now, I was mostly interested in the Normans, and $50 for around $200 worth of stuff is fantastic enough, but to get a VERY good start on an Irish army was an unexpected bonus.  The Irish are a "horde" army which in general will need twice the number of figures that a more professional force would have, and even 100 figures is only "a good start", but the more I read up on the Dark Ages Irish, the more interesting they become.  They'll definitely go into the queue after the Vikings (who invaded Ireland in a big way), and maybe even before the Normans.

Ok, using German to get my alliteration isn't fair.  Too bad.

 

On Ebay, I picked up a squad of 6 painted "Spartans" (Halo style, not 300 style) , which are actually THW "Symon" figures painted in the classic Halo "green/gold" style.  They're pretty cool, and the price was slightly less than buying the figures and having someone else paint them for me, so "yay me".

 

THW has finally released more figures in their 5150 line - the Hishen and the Grath, which I have also picked up.  In both cases, I bought enough figures to make up a squad of each.

 

Hishen are nasty little halfling-sized clones who use weapons sort of like Phasers to help them capture (or kill) slaves.  They are pretty wimpy on their own, but when they get into little buzzing swarms of 3-4 guys, look out - they combine psychically into one super-elite warriors in a sort of "Voltron" way.

 

Grath are BIG dumb brutes who fire .50 caliber machine guns from the hip.  They're not actually single organisms, but are more like a Portuguese Man-Of-War in that they consist of a colony of mutually symbiotic organisms.  Because of this, they're damn near indestructable (cut off the head - it's the only way) but not very sophisticated.  Think "The Thing" from the '50s movie, only with a bit more intelligence and a really big gun.

 

Hishen are definitely "bad guys" in the 5150 universe.  The Grath are organic weapons and will fight for anyone.  Both are pretty bad news in their own ways, and fortunately have pretty simple paint schemes so they'll be fast to paint.  (Hishen, being clones, all dress alike and Grath aren't really imaginative enough to want different styles)

 

So at this point, my scifi "arsenal" looks like this:

Ready to field:

 1 squad of Spugs

 1 squad of Symons

 1 Starfleet Away team (could use some fine detailing)

Mostly Done:

 1 demi-squad of Vargr (need fur and details)

 1 squad of Spugs (just need highlights and eyes)

 2 squads of "Appleseed" armored troops (could field now, but want to re-do armor)

 2 squads of Hydrissians (One partly done, the other just primed)

Primed/Mounted:

 1 squad of Mephalians

 2 Sci-fi characters with armor and rifles.

 10 or so Space Marines

 A bunch of Tyranid stuff

Still "in the box":

 1 "Land Mate"

 1 Spugnaut

 1 Mephalian Gort Beast

 

DEBRIEFING OF CAPTIVE SPUG DRONE 18.02-B

TRANSLATED AND INTERPRETED BY DANE HAGGARDORN, DXS

 

I was on the world your people call Anegal Illimu when I died.  As I drank the life of my enemy, I heard the hivesong fail.  Your shift your posture; does discussing the Gray Feast upset you?  I honor my foes with swift and sure death so that they may be reborn.  Would you not extend the same courtesy?  But I digress…

 

My demi-hive touched down early in the cycle, and the Hive Queen sang the sweet songs of deployment.  Enraptured to her will, we prepared for invasion.  We cleaned and checked our weapons, patched our shells and sang the hymns of glorious combat.  You cannot understand the joy of obedience to the hivesong.  The queen is our mother and our leader.  She gives us love and purpose, and we honor her love with the fruits of battle.

 

Initial scans indicated only a small Gaia Prime garrison guarding your Khallat mines, and a platoon was sent out to secure the mining village.  Our Thetas had spent the night seeding the miners’ dreams with despair, and the perimeter guards fell to our shard rifles without even raising the alarm.  One by one, miners fell to our rifles as we sang in chorus with our Queen.  The grand symphony of death, song, and the Gray Feast drove us deeper into the outpost.

 

When my Alpha’s voice left the chorus I scarcely noticed, but when our SPUGnaut’s refrain fell silent, I felt our choir falter.  The Queen’s song changed – her voice grew urgent as she sang the dire hymns of betrayal and retreat.  We few who remained turned to leave the camp.  I had stopped to free one last soul when the inferno bombs erupted, destroying my hivebrothers and forever silencing my Queen.

 

My brothers turned their shard rifles on each other, but I was not able to smell their despair pheromones.  I was left alone on Anegal Illimu with no song, no queen and no purpose save to say alive.  Your recovery teams found me five cycles later.

 

I cannot tell you why my queen wished us to conquer Anegal Illimu, and I do not care.  Now that she is gone, I must find my own song.

 

What?  That is a strange question, and it is clear that your people do not understand mine.  I may not simply “join another hive”. They are not my brothers and their queen is not my queen.  I have heard that others of my kind have found employment among your people.  If you see fit not to terminate my life, I intend to seek such employment myself.

Well it looks like my draft for using Alpha Forge's "Mephalian" figures in 5150 is going to be used!  Yay, this counts as my first writing credit in a published work.  I've had some snippets of ideas show up in published works before, but never a few pages of information.  The odds are I won't be credited by name, but I don't care.

 

I'm hoping to get a free copy of the book, but since I did it as a labor of love and without making any deals with the publisher, I'm pretty much at his mercy.  Ed's an honorable man though, so we'll see what happens.