Christmas Game

As usual we had a fun little Christmas game at Chris Flowers barn, followed by a meal at the Duke of Wellington appropriately enough.

13 of us this year.

After making a great success of the last Christmas game amongst a few others, Chris Charlton organised a fun Sci-Fi skirmish game first designed by Terry Joy. You may remember some of the figures.

The premise is a space station on the home planet of the Maskii. Each player has one figure with a sheet showing their attributes. One player is on security patrol near the control room, the rest are on the planet surface when the alarms go off to warn of a Makii incursion. Andy did mention they were perhaps off for Pie and Peas!

The stop watch is set at 75 minutes and players must get from the entry ports to control room and seal the doors to win.

Couple of rules, there cannot be any Maskii on the flight deck and once the doors seal the security system destroys everyone outside, Human or Maskii.

I opt to have a bit of fun and play Maskii along with Chris.

A D10 and percentage dice are used to dictate which of 100 spots on the station the Maskii appear at. The Humans get 6 actions which can be a mixture of moving and firing.

The Maskii get 4 moves and one shot. They are very very poor shots but a little bit nasty in close combat.

Malcolm's character is the dietitian and is the security guard, as the rest of the crew start to make their way from the main doors Malcolm quickly gets to the control room. However once there he realises he has  along wait before he can seal the doors if he is not exterminate the whole crew.

Malcolm decides to go out and take on the nearest Maskii, however in the Maskii turn two more drop into the control room behind him and he is looking to be in a bit of trouble.

In the Maskii turn each one moves 4 squares towards the nearest human, gets one shot at anything ti can see needing a double 3 to hit with a hand gun or a double of any number with the large guns (I did say they were bad shots) they resolve any hand to hand if they are adjacent to a human then we role 2 D6 to see how many more Maskii turn up using the d10 and percentage dice to dictate where they randomly arrive. As you can imagine they turn up just at the wrong place and the wrong time usually.

Malcolm fires at the nearest Maskii and misses, they then close in on him and quickly overwhelm him.

There are groans from the Human players as I get hold of the d6 for reinforcements. 12 more Maskii turn up with a couple landing immediately next to the humans and quickly overwhelming them.

The crew are picked off one by one or break up into groups, each player gets a new Human to start from scratch when his first one is dead. Rich C, Andy and Rich H form a little group and hug the left side of the station covering each other as they advance toward the control room.

With 24 minutes to go they still have nearly half of the station to traverse.

As they close in I roll another double six for reinforcements and more of the human crew are overwhelmed but Rich, Andy and Rich keep coming.

Rich C clears the way to the blast doors and Andy and Rich H get in only to have two more Maskii randomly arrive in there with them before they can start the security procedure. They kill the Maskii but Rich H is knocked over.

With Rich C just two steps from the blast doors Andy hits the button locking him and the security system scours the station of all life wiping out both the Maskii and whats left of the Human crew.

There were literally seconds left on the clock as Andy hit the button.

And here is Richards character looking mildly unhappy at his imminent doom now the doors are locked.

A really fun game to finish off the year and then a great deal of yabber about next years various projects over a lovely meal at the Wellie (I had steak and chips in case you were wondering).

Cheers Chris!