While doing a google image search I came across an overhead shot of the game that links back to a show report from Gareth Wood. Did a search in the period after Phalanx but never picked this one up.

Phalanx is on Saturday 18th June 2011 next year. Hopefully it wont be snowing then. Had to cancel my planned trip down to Pudsey on Saturday for the Recon Show due to the bad weather.
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My main worries was if there was any major differences between the more recent rulebooks and Martin’s colection of classic material, and trying to study the mech sheets to work out optimum ranges and heat usages for the variety of Mechs. It’s a lot harder than running a single one, and the old style mech sheets are not as helpful for weapon and heat info as the newer ones are.

Before going to his meeting Martin gave each player their own secret ‘special’ objective. Turns out at the end of the night most of these fall into the silly category, such as making sure the bases vile canteen gets destroyed.

The space mercs hired by the government of the local planet of continue to advance upon the Lyran base, in what has now become a three way political situation. The encroaching asked the Lyrans to vacate the area or be removed by force. Naturally enough the characters, like the good Stenier puppets they are, decided to fight rather than give in and managed to get their Mechs quickly out of the base without standing on too many Nissen Huts.

An even tonnage fight, but with the being given flat piloting and gunnery to make my life easier, but with no bonus to initiative rolls. My 5 Mechs vs the 6 of the Lyrans, so the maneuver advantage should always be with the characters. An Atlas, 2 OSTROCS, Wolverine and another mech.

Both forces unusually closed rapidly upon each other, and most of the action was to occur upon the classic starter map rather than the built up map of the base. One of the Lyran Mechs broke the first rule of how not to be seen, and stood out in the open, for a number of my mechs to fire at it, at their optimum range. The others had wisely hid behind woodlands and hills to gain cover bonuses.

Both Mechs standing toe to toe had taken 20+ hits, the Lyran Mech now looking in a bad way. But it did manage it’s piloting roll to remain upright, as opposed to the opposing Mech, which fell over and managed to land on it’s head for 5 damage and knocking the pilot unconscious. Given the amount of heat it was venting this wasn’t too critical, and the opposing Mechs, being in the most parts noble, refused to shoot a Mech when it’s down inactive.

The medium Mechs then spent a few turns trading fire with each other, as a Lyran Light tried to work its way round to a flank position.

The Atlas was firing its load off and its heat level was slowly rising. A sneaky flamer from the opposition gave it two heat to push it into possible shutdown zone, but it made its roll ok. What it did not make was it’s piloting roll for taking 20 damage from PPC and laser hits, and it, like its companion earlier, also toppled to the ground.

At this point Martin managed to get out of his meeting and retook control of the situation. Eventually the battle petered out to a stalemate as the damage on both sides mounted up.
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Couldn’t hit anything at all the first couple of turns, and 2/3rds of my A/Cs were destroyed or forced to retreat. My misses were despite of forgetting to take movement to-hit factors into account.

Things didn’t improve over the next few turns, despite the Germans having some difficulties against the British Heavy Tanks.

So the British retired off the field while the Germans regrouped.

Intended to be a multi-players demo game for some scouts, I wouldn’t like to be the ones who get control of the Cars!
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Usual scenario, a larger French force vs a smaller but better crewed British one.

From Furness Wargamers at Sea

We left Paul to single-handedly (like a pirate?) deal with Matt’s squadron as we picked, two to one, upon the weaker British squadron in the hopes of a quick victory.

The British just managed to inflict the break point damage first, the French were only about one decent broadside from achieving the same so the scenario appeared to be well balanced.
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A fun, relatively quick to play dungeon raid game. A big box game with high quality components including plastic minatures and thick, glossy, cardboard tiles. The Monsters provided are mostly undead types, which fits in nicely with the classic Ravenloft theme.

From Furness Wargamers Fantasies

Only 1st and 2nd level characters available, and almost like the 3rd edition Dungeons and Dragons Miniature games in terms of the stat cards for the players and monsters. The tiles are similar designs and style to the game boards for the RPG but with Jigsaw edges making direct compatibility difficult. The figures look to be taken from the miniature game as well, I’m sure that the Kobold figures could be a version of the legendary Meepo.

Movement is a mixture of by squares for characters and by tiles for Monsters. A number of monsters have particularly nasty attacks in certain positional situations, such as spiders web attack from a tile away. As per the later version of the miniatures game any attempt at a semi-accurate orthogonal movement system has been kicked out, and it is just as easy to go diagonal as straight ahead; which something I don’t really like.

Old timers were grumbling about the new roll to hit Magic Missiles, it’s not very magical if they can miss.

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A simple warm up game with just fighters, to get a new player familiarised with the game, was followed by what the rulebook describes as a ‘Stop Them’ scenario.

From Furness Wargamers in the Air

2 Zeppelin Staakens, the biggest craft in the set with seven crew members, vs 4 allied fighters, 2 British and 1 French and 1 American. The bombers mission was simple, traverse across the board and avoid being shot down by the approaching fighters.

The bombers stayed in formation to give each other covering fire, as the allied initially split fire on the approach to the craft. This soon switched to concentrating on the rearmost plane, but meant inevitably taking a lot of damage from the rear arc gunners.

Colin, who was in charge of both bombers, did jink a bit to keep the fighters in the much more damaging rear arcs, and to stop the attackers from exploiting the rear blind spots. But this forced him towards the edge of the board, and when the picked upon rear craft went down, the other turned and exited the board from the side.

So one giant down, the other chased off, for the loss of two (non-British) fighters, and with heavy damage all round.

This was followed by an actual bombing mission, as an allied seaplane and escort attempted to bomb an inland target against the opposition of 3 central Power fighters. Two of the defenders came in too fast and overshot the seaplane, meaning they had to turn and play catch up as the plane started its run on the target. The 3rd defender got in a good position, but was stuck in the rear arcs of the bomber and in close range of the escort fighter (controlled by myself) and ended up shot to pieces in a single round.

Unfortunately the bomb drop was mistimed and failed to hit the target despite the clear run on target. Bombing from height is quite hard to judge and the bombs fell just long of the target card.
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I managed to play a couple of Wings of War games with Tony, who despite never playing the game before soon picked up the tactic. Avoided using the altitude rules as for new players and single head-to-head games I find it redundant. Altitude is best used for ‘furballs’ with 6-8 planes involved. Didn’t get the chance to use my newly purchased ‘Flight of the Giants’ expansion yet.

From Furness Wargamers in the Air

Other games going on…

Graeme was controlling a game of Flintloque between Colin and Matt. Orcs of Albion vs Elves of Armorica.

From Furness Wargamers Fantasies

Paul had a multi-player Gundam game in full swing, with Keiron, Baldy, Simon and co. Unusually for Paul this had a printed set of rules! but there was enough scribbling in the margins to suggest it had been tinkered with.

From Furness Wargamers in the Future

Martin and Tristam were Battleteching, and the 40Kers and Rogue Traders were at it elsewhere in the hall.

From Furness Wargamers in the Future

Baldy commenced his usual heroic\foolish charge across the battlefield and managed to take numerous hits before landing a fluky critical when in close combat with the opposing Mech.

This didn’t help much with the juggernaut that was an Atlas bearing down on us. It was left to lance leader Keiron and myself to try and deal with it while keeping a couple of smaller Mechs occupied as well.

The battle with the Atlas took a turn for the worse as we allowed it to get too close which negated our LRMs by getting with their minimum range. Add to that the fact that my Trebuchet was non-jump capable, so with no easy way to escape out of the rough terrain, left me in a sticky situation. Repeated hits to only two locations, Left Arm and Right Leg, soon saw internal damage on my Mech, followed by a critical hit, from transferred damage, on the Left Torso and ammo storage causing the Mech to blow up. Thankfully the ejection device worked OK.

Colin, initially busy commanding some Rats against Graeme’s Toads in a game of Flintloque, the fantasy Napoleonic era skirmish game, was quite happy later on to sit and watch Keiron rack up the experience points for his hijacked character. He finally took out the damaged Atlas in hand to hand, or more accurately Foot to Head, combat. And with the big guy out of the way, the other rival Mechs did a runner.
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First game was fairly standard, with a new player learning the ropes, and a number of successful battles against the foreigners. I manged to pick up a few points on the way by using event cards to help out these battles, but couldn’t buy up enough land or resources. Low scoring in terms of points with Martin winning.

Second game was played at speed due to the limited time left, but was actually finished with no problem for time. This was strongly merchant based game, as a number of disastrous wars saw the lands depleted. Colin took victory with his pile of mercantile cash. I came second with my lands and resources after a quick early bout of merchanting before a war with Russia took them out.
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