CelestiCon 2014

EDIT: 2014.11.02 I the pics that I got from Kyle! 

CelestiCon Pictures

Alrighty.  I've finally got some time to write something.  Here's what it looked like at CelestiCon 2014 with our Retropocalypse offering using the MEST 1.5.8 rules (or so).  We had two 4-hour sessions and the first one was a rough start for me; I misremembered some rules and called them incorrectly during game play.  You know the deal; what you remember play-testing is different than what is written in the rules.  It made for some stress and some grumpiness for the players especially since - as a practice - I hand out free copies of the rules book.  Otherwise I think it went okay.  

As always I didn't get a chance to take photos during game-play.  I'll just need another 8 years for my eldest child to get old enough to responsibly shoot pictures for this blog.  Until then, here's what I have; the start of the first session;

I'm setting the character cards up.
Giant man is admiring my precision.

This is one of the faction cards and the top
of one of the character cards.

A close up of the Cultist character cards.

Here's Anika from the She-wolves.  Her faction wasn't used.

Here's a better shot of the entire set of minis
and character cards.  There's a total of 7 factions
with about 10 minis each.

View from the far side of the table.  CelestiCon organizers
were very generous and gave us a humongous set
of tables.  Any how, from this corner the Vault Dwellers
faction was used and they pinned down the Survivors faction
across the board at the left.  `should have been there.

This corner had a father and son? team each playing
as the Red Army faction.  They pretty much caused
problems with the Mutant Hillbillies across the board
and at the left. The Survivors at the right were
also limited in mobility as a result.

Here I am trying to be precise.  I actually confused
myself numerous times.

The Red Army team.

We tried our best to keep everybody involved.

Actually might be early during game set-up.

This is from the Survivor's faction view point.

I tried something new with this leaderboard concept so that
I could track Resource Points.  I will need to redo the
concept a little because I had a hard time moving around
the magnets which I used as pins for scoring as they would
continually stick to each other.

Simple AAR Session One

Five players arranged as so:

MH|  |VD
--+--+--
RA|RA| S

From the arrangement you can see that the Vault Dwellers (VD) have a lot of breathing room. Their Comm-link equipment and AI/Bot characters allow them to dominate during any action.  The Survivors (S) are literally cornered within some ruined building walls because of the nearby presence of the Red Army (RA) as well.  Some activity occurred at that half of the board to pick up objective markers for Resource Points but there wasn't otherwise a lot of movement.

At the left side of the battlefield the Mutant Hillbillies (MD) had to deal with the remainder Red Army team. From what I remember, Leroy (the mutant gator thing) finally got to rush into the fray at the center-line of the battlefield to acquire some more objective markers but during this process Ben (the mutant critter thing) got kild-ed.  The middle Red Army player placed a soldier atop the gas-station building and that essentially created a large area with which he could cover.  

Three hours passed very quickly at 4 Turns into play.  I started this session without declaring all of the rules and abilities for the players in order to not bore them but apparently I spent a lot of time during the session clarifying rules and re-playing actions in order to be fair to each player.  I corrected this failure in my communication in the next session.

Simple AAR Session Two

Two players arranged across each other at the middle third of the battlefield as so:

  | C|
--+--+--
  | S| 

I remember it was Cultists (C) versus Survivors (S).  This was a surprisingly tense session as both players seemed to be tactical game veterans who quickly grasped the rules.  Not so!  The Cultists player was experiencing her first tactical miniatures boardgame and was doing a phenomenal job of keeping the Survivor player - a veteran of many game systems and battles - tasked with tough decisions.  

In this session I did my best to inform each player of their various options and character or faction abilities as soon as I could.  It came back as a reward to watch very interesting game-play unfold.  The Survivors rushed to areas near the center-line road to cover large fields of fire which forced the Cultists player to eventually make the hard decision to risk penetrating that line with a few characters in order to acquire more Resource Points.

About two hours passed and the game concluded with a hand-shake.

The young guy sitting down is a veteran of tabletop affairs.

Our lady opponent was surprising in her tactical
acumen being that this was her first meeting engagement!

Aha! A chance to explain a rule! I think these two
enjoyed their game, and if so; I'm happy about that.