Marcon 33 - an FT Game Report

Marcon Mini Gaming Report - by Indy

Last weekend I dropped in at Marcon for a couple days. Robin Atkin Downs
(Byron) and Fiona Avery (Reference Editor, behind-the-scenes gal) were
the B5
guests there that weekend. There was a wide variety of costumed
participants at
the con (B5, Star Trek, a good Darth Vader w/about half a dozen Storm
Troopers
and a really good Han Solo to go along with them, various
fantasy-related, The
Tick and DeFleder Mouse, a few Starship Troopers (no requisite alien
bugs ;),
and a great many Medieval period outfits, partly because Melody
Apslund-Faith
was also a GoH at the con - but I digress).

In addition to a couple of Hubble presentations I made and a handful of
other
panels I attended/stopped in on, I also ran a Full Thrust game. Kyle
Klinger,
Dale Mazzola, and Scott Miller were at the con, and joined in on the
game, as
did a couple other guys from last year. Plus a couple new people (one a
newbie
to FT). The game I ran was basically Jon Davis' Cruiser Duel game. The
game was
called "The New Anglian Naval Academy Cruiser Duel", and so with the
Fleet Book
being out, I gave each player a modified Vanguard-class heavy cruiser
(basically a Vanguard-II; dropped the multi-arc Class-3 batt to
single-arc,
added in another Class-1 batt and a subpack; this forced the players to
*maneuver* in order to bring their Class-3 batt to bear). The basic idea
was
that each player has been training for captaincy of a cruiser, and this
was
final exam time. :-)  So, using Jon's rules, I set up the 7 ships,
distributed
to the players their ship sheets, let them read over the scenario rules
and
info to fly their newly-designed ships (eg, get used to the fact they
were
going to be working in a 6-arc enviroment and not a 4-arc one), then let
them
go at it.

In order to score points, players had to chose targets each turn and
fire as
many weapons they could bring to bear. For every die they rolled of
*beam* fire
(the subpack was 'free' damage; the players got no points for firing
them, but
they could damage enemy ships), the players in question got 1 pt to
their
cumulative score. At the end of turn 10, all surviving ships could tally
up
their remaining damage boxes, divide it by two, and add the final number
to
their accumulated score.

Unfortunately I didn't keep detailed notes as to the turn-by-turn
blow-by-blow
because I was too busy moderating and explaining occassionally stuff to
onlookers who stopped by. But 2 hours after it started 2 ships were
*gone*, and
5 remained. It was turn 10. One ship scooted away, only moderately
damaged. The
rest were hurting pretty badly. The average speed was in the
upper-teens/
lower-20s, but the newbie was flashing about the board around speed 30.
And
with a Thrust rating of 6, he managed to keep himself on the board with
nary a
problem.

Once the turn 10 smoke cleared, the points were tallied. Dale Mazzola
came in
first, with Scott Miller right behind him. The newbie, Barry Muhilville,
pulled
out third, with the remaining two players (Kyle among them) coming in
close
behind in 4th and 5th places.

Unfortunately, due to our ever-so-speedy postal service, the prizes that
KR
had generously sent out to me for this scenario had not arrived before I
left
(even though he sent them out a week before as priority mail). When I
returned
on Tuesday I found the prizes sitting in my mailbox. So I packed them up
and
sent them off to the scenario winners. They should arrive any day now (I
hope;
hey Kyle, check with Dale and Scott, lemme know when they get 'em).

Mk
------------------------------------------------------------------------
-
Daune: "How can you be asleep and getting ready at the same time?"

Indy: "I'm multi-tasking..."