Tuesday, March 22, 2022

Klingon Armada - Actual play

This weekend I played an actual game for the first time in a long time. 

Stew, of the excellent blog A terrible Loss of Lead and Wealth, had suggested that he was interested in trying out some Star Trek-esque gaming, and we eventually hashed out a time to get together.  As long time readers know, I have been very slowly building up a couple of TOS era forces basically since the blog began.  Despite this long build up, I still needed to prepare for the game, and spent a number of evenings painting up a few more ships and some various tokens and such. I also put together a quick reference sheet, since there is no official one, and printed a play mat.  

Drone/Missile markers of two types
Shuttles

Federation shuttle markings

Newly painted D6 cruiser

Stew had a very lovely set up with shade and three tables that more than accommodated the 3x4 foot mat I printed off at work. He took the perfidious Federation and I took the noble warrior Klingons. 

CB New Jersey Class, CA Constitution Class, DD Saladin Class, FF Burke class

D7 class cruiser, 2 D6 class cruisers, F5 and E4 frigates 

Despite both being bloggers, we were more than a little caught up in the game and I only managed one picture of the game!  

Scene of destruction

Hopefully Stew took more pictures. 

The game played very smoothly, although we both agreed that drones (heavy missiles) seemed a bit pointless, since in the numbers used they hit nothing!  Maybe next time I will have to take a CAG variant to really pump them out.  We also tried out of a few of the more esoteric Trek technologies, but unfortunately my glorious boarding action merely eliminated the redshirts on the New Jersey, and did not capture the ship. 

I had a great time, and Stew said he was hooked, so there ought to be more games in the future. 

7 comments:

FourEyedMonster said...

Nice! Really nice! It's so rare for me to see painted Star Trek minis ... and I love all things Star Trek! Great work :)

Dai said...

Glad to hear you and Stew finally were able to meet up! The game looks great too. It'll only be a matter of time before Stew has his own fleet and a star hex-map to go with it to run his own games.

Weapons-wise - don't recall too much drones or missile action in the shows or even the few novels I've read? Is it even worth including them so you could better concentrate on phaser/disrutors and torpedoes all the more?

Stew said...

Thanks for the fun game and for bringing everything needed to play. Painted ships and everything. I really liked your drone markers too.
I did take a few more pictures: I’ll have them up on the next post.
I feel bad that we got the drone rules wrong (or the 1st edition got it wrong) as it seems they are kinda important to the Klingons. We’ll do better next time. Now paint up 2 more ships for each fleet for our next game. 😀

Stew said...

Yes: after the dark ages project I’ll likely go all in. You know me well. 😀

Lasgunpacker said...

Thanks guys, it was a fun day out, and it was great to finally getting these ships on the table was awesome.

Drones are big in the Starfleet universe, which at this point is best thought of as "Star Trek Adjacent". Since the rules we had were for those ships, they had drones. It would not take too much effort to create canon versions of the ships for the "real" Star Trek universe... but it would require the Star Trek universe to stay still long enough to be so quantified!

And Stew, I already have about a half dozen more ships for the fleets painted!

Stew said...

You do huh?!! Our rematch awaits then.
Since we broke our teeth with 4/5 ships and I don’t think it was all that hard; maybe next time can be 6-8. 😀

tim said...

Ha-ha! yeah. I've played a few games starting with the intention of taking lots of pics for proper game report... and then getting so wrapped up in the game I totally forget to take pictures - or suddenly stop taking pictures part way through the game. It's usually when I'm playing a newish game or one I haven't played in a while and have to keep looking up rules...