GenCon Review with a GZG Emphasis (part 2 of 4)

The First Day

I usually leave the Thursday morning slot open at GenCon. This lets me
get into the dealer's room as it opens. There were a number of
interesting things this year. I picked up the board game _Cults Across
America_, an officially licensed Call of Cthulhu product produced by
Atlas Games. I also got sucke... persuaded to buy a Cults t-shirt and
"cult crossing" sign. The sign is a large, heavy plastic, yellow diamond
road sign with the silhouette of a cowled figure carrying a flamethrower
in the middle. Below the diamond is a yellow rectangle that says "Cult
Crossing Next 3000 Miles." Very cool. :-)  Chaosium was selling Elder
Sign pendants, something my roleplaying group had been hoping to find
for years. I'm a big _Call of Cthulhu_ fan, so miniatures and Cthulhu
are my main GenCon attractions. The only downer of the day was that I
lost a brand new dice bag with brand new dice I had bought for SG2. I
had to buy them again the next day, for a loss of about $20 in dice. The
plastic bag they were in had ripped and they fell out. Needless to say I
wasn't a happy camper.

>From a miniatures perspective, there seemed to be more miniatures
dealers than in the past. You had the usual suspects: our very own
Geo-Hex, RAFM, the Evil Empire, and Ral Partha; the relatively new kids
on the block: Pinnacle (Deadlands, Great Rail Wars), Heartbreaker
(Warzone, Chronopia), Reaper, Demonblade; the smaller independents:
Lance and Laser (with Fortress Miniatures), Goblintooth (Hostile
Aircraft), Easy Eight (Battleground World War II), Lou Zocchi (with his
plastic Star Trek ships, and yes he is very much alive). What's
interesting was that a lot of these companies that were primarily
lead-only had rule sets out, as well as miniatures. RAFM had _Universal
Soldier_, Demonblade had _Shockforce_. Even RPG publisher White Wolf had
its SF/superhero miniatures game out, as did CCG/RPG publisher Five
Rings Publishing (now owned by WOTC) with their Clan Wars minis game.

I didn't get a chance to try a lot of different systems. Due to a tip by
Rick Rutherford, I picked up the Shockforce rulebook (until Rick told
me, I didn't know they were selling the rules separately from the boxed
edition). I took a look at Clan Wars. Yes, it is supposed to be a
FANTASY game, but I thought it might work as a samurai historical game.
It won't. There seemed to be very little in the way of samurai flavour.
There are no honour rules, for instance, or rules for samurai army
formations. It could just as easily have been orcs or Romans fighting. A
couple of companies had starship combat games, but I don't think they
will touch Full Thrust. I heard rumours that GW was bringing back their
Starfleet line, which might be of interest to FT players.

The first game I played was a St. Lo scenario for _Battleground World
War II_. This is a nice set of rules. It's a WWII skirmish set that is
well laid out and easy to learn. The company also has an attitude
similar to GZG: you bought the rules, so you make of them what you like.
They support the game well and they run an interesting scenario. It had
the feel of a historically accurate game, which was good having recently
seen _Saving Private Ryan_. (Hint: see this movie!!!) The figures were
pretty nice, but of a strange scale for historicals. They are around
28mm. The intention was for them to match 1/48 scale, a popular plastic
model scale. This makes them nice and visual, but also makes them
incompatible with most other WWII scales. The game can easily be played
in the more popular HO, 20mm, and 15mm scales, though. I can recommend
this rule set to WWII gamers.

I was supposed to play Stargrunt 2 next, but ended up getting roped into
running the game instead of playing it. Jeff Guillion asked me to run
the game because Peter, the designated ref, was slated for back-to-back
games and needed a break. Jeff taught the rules, and Peter and I ran the
game. The problem was that I play a pure SG2 game while Jeff and Peter
use a number of house rules. The result for the first 30 minutes was
chaos as I was making different rulings than Peter. Peter, thankfully,
is pretty perceptive and realized this. He bowed out, and with one
referee it went much smoother. I'm taking this as an object lesson.
Either don't play a demo game with ANY house rules, or make sure
everyone knows them up front, or make sure there is ONE referee that
makes all the decisions. The players enjoyed themselves, though, and
really liked the game.

The last game of the night was a Full Thrust game using Lew Stoneking's
house rules for Sa'vasku. It was a Sa'vasku vs. Kravak game. I've never
seen Kravak players so humbled before... To be honest (as the Sa'vasku
admiral) the rules still need to be cleaned up a tad. In particular,
Sa'vasku were taking damage in a turn but the effect on their power use
didn't happen until the following turn. This was a big advantage.
Another was the Sa'vasku beam weaponry that was not only more powerful
at shorter ranges, but more effective as well. Still, there is something
very enjoyable about rolling 34 dice for a beam hit on an enemy ship! I
think Lew is on to something, but it still needs a bit of work. In the
end, the Sa'vasku lost one element (out of 4; it was commanded by Dean
Gundberg who was more-or-less intentionally left without support) and
three or four other ships, while the Kravak lost their entire fleet.
Lopsided, but lots of fun.

Allan Goodall	       agoodall@sympatico.ca

"We come into the world and take our chances
 Fate is just the weight of circumstances
 That's the way that Lady Luck dances
 Roll the bones." - N. Peart