Stars & Lasers a simple battle.

Well it has been a while since I have managed to get in a game, what with work, the new company and life in general I have found it harder and harder to get in many games, so tonight as I couldn’t make it to my club I got Mrs Mac to roll some dice in a game of Stars & Lasers… I say roll some dice, the Mrs has played before and knows most of the rules and normally beats me, but tonight it was going to be different, I was going to win!!! well maybe.

So for this game as the title of this post suggests I am going to keep this simple, two small basic forces meeting, no fighters, no super heavy ships, just a couple of light cruisers with some frigates as escorts.

My small force will be surveying deep inside an asteroid field hoping to get some mining ships here to get some much-needed ore, as long as the surveys show there are enough deposits of the ore in the asteroids.

Mrs Mac will be coming into the area with her patrol to kick my ships out so that her mining ships can come and get the ore.

So that’s the scenario, so on to the set-up.

You probably can’t see from the pictures but the game is being played on an odd shaped table, there is only a small section of clear space inside of the asteroid field that is all around, any ship that leaves the three table edges will be destroyed by the masses of asteroids all around, the only safe way in or out of this section is from the direction the Mrs Mac’s ships will be coming from.

This means there will be some tight manoeuvring needed while fighting in the small space… (yep that is our dining room table, my normal gaming table is covered with lots of modelling stuff and figures so it was the downstairs table or no game)

After several minutes of the usual banter and ribbing about the expected bad dice rolling and the usual bad tactics, and you would make a bad ships captain etc. etc. I told her to stop being nasty to me and play the game… 😥

I set up my two light cruisers close to the end of the table near a couple of clusters of asteroids at zero speed, they were surveying the rocks so were not moving, my three frigates were around the centre of the table at half speed just checking the area was safe, then a force of ships FTL’ed into the area and were heading at combat speed towards my ships.

Mrs Mac brought on her two light cruisers and her three frigates at full speed and charged towards my ships.

These ships were crewed by women from a planet controlled by a tyrannical female empress, these ships were going to be trouble…

Turn one saw lots frantic movement from my ships with the frigates trying to get into position to try and slow Mrs Macs ships until my light cruisers could get up to speed and get in the fight.

This was the challenging part of the scenario, my frigates had to slow the enemy ships down to give my light cruisers time to get up some speed to be effective in the fight, the table is 6ft long but only 2ft 6” wide so my light cruisers will be a long way away from the main fight for probably about three turns… I just need my frigates to survive that long!

Turn two saw a few missiles flying out from my ships to try and push the crazy women crews away, we also exchanged a few long shots at each other but the only thing that was hit were a few shields.

Turn three and my frigates were in the thick of the battle, with the captains screaming at the light cruisers to get their engines working faster!

They were already taking damage from the enemy ships, damn those female crews were deadly shots.

It had been a long while since Mrs Mac had played Stars & Lasers but it didn’t take her long to get back into the swing of things, her ships were getting into good positions and were starting to punish my frigates, I was getting worried already.

Turn four and I lost the first frigate to a ton of shots from two light cruisers and a frigate, my other two frigates were also taking more damage… if only my engineers had managed to get the shields back up on their ships, that would have helped.

My light cruisers were now starting to add a few shots into the fight but they were still not close enough to have any real impact on the fight.

Turn five and I was in real trouble, Mrs Mac moved in a light cruiser and a frigate to attack my two light cruisers, and the weapons crews on those ships were well trained they stripped away one of my ships shields then managed to knock out the comm’s on the ship, the crew could do nothing while they frantically tried to get the comm’s back up.

I turned the other light cruiser and headed towards the rest of the enemy ships and fired off some missiles and poured shots into the closest enemy frigate, and did almost no damage.

The crew on the little ship were not troubled by this they simple returned fire and managed to rock my ship with explosions from several critical systems… I wanted to pack up and go home, but I realised I was home so I picked up my dice and continued the battle.

I then lost another frigate from heavy fire from the enemy frigates and her other light cruiser.

So at the end of turn five I had one badly damaged frigate, one badly damaged out of control light cruiser and one light cruiser that was heading into a lot of enemy ships, lets hope that my engineers can get all my shields back up and working or I was going to be in a lot of trouble…

Turn six and you guessed it, my engineers didn’t get any ship shields up again this turn.

My badly damaged light cruiser didn’t make the turn back away from the asteroids and smashed into one of the smaller rocks, but it didn’t matter about the size that much as the rock was still bigger than the ship, the crew had already left the ship in their escape pods so at least they got a good view of their ship exploding!!

My last remaining frigate took several hits in its unprotected side and was ripped in two, the crew of that ship were not very lucky as none made it to the escape pods.

Then my remaining light cruiser fired everything it could at all the enemy ships that it could target and well all I managed to do was to strip away their shields… then Mrs Mac fired back and that was that, my last ship the light cruiser spun slowly away dead.

Well it looks like the ore in those asteroids will not be coming my way anytime soon, Mrs Mac’s miners will be getting it all.

That was really a fun game, but as always, my luck and dice rolling was against me the whole time, my ships engineers failed to re-instate any shields on my ships for the last three turns!!! Add to that my weapons crews couldn’t hit a thing and you have the reason why I lost that fight.

Not taking anything away from Mrs Mac who played really well and deserved the win, but I just couldn’t do anything right for most of that battle, still she has challenged me to another battle soon so hopefully I can get my revenge.

If nothing else my awful dice rolling made the Mrs laugh… lots ☹️