The Baron invited me to his annual Birthday/Octoberfest/Halloween game last weekend. I've had several invites over the years but this time I was able to go! The Revenant Hunt pits 6 teams of four Victorian-era Zombie Hunters against, well. . . zombies, and each other in an infested Gothic ruin. Rules are Wiley Games' Fistful of Lead: Tales of Horror. There are six Spawn Points in the ruins and each noise made - chiefly the use of gunpowder weapons - spawns and attracts zombies. Each zombie "killed" awards a team one point. There are bigger threats that can be attracted, too, like werewolves and ghosts, which are harder to kill but award five points. Destroying a Spawn Point is worth five points, too, and eliminating them is the key to surviving the game.
Here is my intrepid team; characters and cards created by The Baron. Actually, everything in this game including the terrain and painted minis are courtesy of The Baron.
My starting position was on the left side of the center ruin so the team headed off to the left away from the other teams. The yellow bursts represent noise from shooting, which causes zombies to spawn and head toward the news. Here they come, from two local Spawn Points, the graveyard and the idol.
Clementine was given the job of destroying the idol but zombies kept spawning from it. . .
I never had to face a werewolf but did have a ghost harass us for awhile until it left on its own. Two of the teams faced off against each other for the right to destroy a spawn point. When the game was called I ended up in the middle of the pack points-wise, and never got that idol destroyed.
After a chili-dog break The Baron set up another game for us. This was a pulp-era aircraft game a la Crimson Skies. The Baron and I both love the old school Crimson Skies universe and the boardgame, but the game takes a long time to play with more than two players. You can do it, as I proved when I lived in Tulsa, but the games turn into day-long marathons because of pre-turn plotting and the graphic damage tracking. The damage tracking is fun if you get into that but it is inherently unrealistic as neither pilot would have access to that info in "real life." You can check out some of the earlier posts in my blog re Crimson Skies.
So The Baron has adapted the post-apocalyptic auto racing game Gaslands (with help from the internet) to play with the Crimson Skies models. I've never played Gaslands. The adaptation gets rid of both the pre-game plotting and the detailed damage tracking, using a staggered turn sequence with initiative and move templates to direct movement. This game was not as pretty as the Revenant Hunt - except for the pretty airplanes - as it is still in play-test mode, but it was great fun to have the Crimson Skies models on the table again!
The aircraft from Dixie (think re-branded Confederacy) were supporting a bombing run into the Industrial States of America (think "Rust Belt" states). I controlled the Behemoth - the bomber - and the Valiant. The Behemoth is a big slow beast with a lot of hull points that can absorb damage while the Valiant is a fast, nimble little fighter. . . that didn't last long in this fight. Our opponents from the ISA:
My Behemoth's job was to make a slow (no other choice) straight run down the gauntlet to the bombing target. My team mates were to clear the path of ISA interceptors. Here you can see the planes beginning to engage amid the various templates, each matched to the current speed of the aircraft, that one can choose to maneuver the planes.
At one point in the game an ISA plane flew directly in front of my Behemoth; I did not expect to have such a clean opportunity for a shot since everyone knew I had to basically fly straight forward as much as possible. The Behemoth has machine guns AND six rockets. . . and I immediately flashed back to a Crimson Skies game I played in Tulsa YEARS ago in which I was flying another lumbering bomber, a Phalanx, loaded with eight machine guns AND eight rockets. I found myself - inexplicably - directly behind an Ace pilot with a perfect bead on his plane. My dilemma: it was early in the game and I had a long bombing run to fly and if I used my rockets now I wouldn't have them later. . . and what if I "needed" them later? So I unloaded with all my machine guns to little effect and then watched helplessly as the Ace "Immelmanned" behind me and blew my bomber, with its full complement of bombs and rockets, to bits. I vowed then and there I would never waste an opportunity like that again. I related this story to all at the table as I readied eighteen dice worth of potential damage - six rockets at 3D6 each - let all 6 rockets go and rolled eleven hits, 2 of which were saved, which left nine hull points - and the aircraft - destroyed! A very satisfying salvo that cleared the way ahead, while my team mates shot the last ISA fighter off my tail.
And here is how I immortalized that little story about the "Big Bomber That Couldn't" all those years ago:
