Stars & Lasers party game.

At the cub this week I put on a party game of stars & Lasers, I had to keep it simple as I would have a couple of guys that hadn’t played before so didn’t want to throw too many different ships at them in their first game.

So I just did a Heavy Cruiser with turreted Railgun, a Frigate and a Corvette for each of them, there was meant to be six players and I was going to play the aliens, but one player decided that they would rather play something else and so I joined the two teams to make it three players per side… so no aliens fighting 😢

So the scenario was a dead alien bio ship in an asteroid and both sides wanted to get anything that they could from the dead ship, any alien tech could add to their ships would give them an advantage.

I was going run this scenario with either a similar force of alien bio ships entering the battle to stop these humans getting any tech from their fallen bio ship or even have it that the big alien ship was not dead just acting that way and was going to activate and start to kill the small human ships!!!  

Any way onto the game….

We split into the two teams with the Green ships ( the ships I was going to control ) Yellow and the Blue ships against the White and Red, the Red and White, and the Black ships.

Each side had three Fighters and three Bombers stands, so we split those in one Fighter and one Bomber each.

Once the data cards were filled out we were ready to set up, I placed a dead alien bio ship in the centre of the board and then added a scattering of asteroids ( including some new ones on flight stands!! )

Table set up, dead alien in the centre with the enemy White and Red ships top left, Red and White ships centre left, Black ships bottom left.
The Blue ships top right, Yellow ships centre right and my Green ships bottom right just off picture!!

All the ships were set up on each side of the table and that was it, turn one started.

As always by the end of turn one everyone was ok with the rules ( even the new players )

Most players just moved their ships closer to the centre, I did hold back my Heavy Cruiser a little to try and tempt the player opposite me to come a little closer which seemed to work ok ( more on this later )

Turn two saw some careful shifting around of Fighters and Bombers, and one or two missiles were fired off, and a few long shots were fired as well but they didn’t really do much damage, just a few downed shields.

Turn three and things started to heat up as the team I was with lost two Corvettes and one of our Frigates took some laser damage, so not a great turn for us.

We also lost two or three Bombers to enemy PDS and two flights of Fighters were shooting at each other close to the centre of the table.

Turn four and we managed a to take out the comm’s of the Red and White Heavy Cruiser, but just couldn’t do enough damage to take the ship out, we did take out one Corvette though for the loss of another a Frigate, my Frigate was down to it’s last point of hull so it wasn’t looking good.

Ok lets talk about my ships… as I said I kept my Heavy Cruiser back a little behind my Frigate and corvette, this drew the black Frigate and eventually the Corvette and the Heavy Cruiser.

My Bombers hiding behind the safety of the asteroid, they should have stayed there!!!

The Frigate took out two of my bombers with its PDS and I did some damage to its hull, also I fired everything I could at the small ship but just could not destroy it 🤬

The Black Frigate in the centre of this picture is now officially hated by me!! Eventually even the Yellow Heavy Cruiser poured shots into it but in the end I found that it was blocking my Heavy Cruiser so I had no choice but to smash into the ship and destroy it!!

That little ship was annoying!

Well we were not having any better luck at the other end of the table, the Blue ships were down to just the Heavy Cruiser and that was in a bad way, it had taken out some attacking enemy Fighter Bombers only to be hit by another one and then two or three missiles just to rub some salt into the wounds!

It finally spun off into space destroyed with the leaving in escape pods… well at that point we were in trouble ( well to be fair we were in trouble at least a turn before, but we just didn’t realise it! )

We did hit back during the turn and took out another Corvette and the Black Heavy Cruiser, oh that was satisfying 😁 I did enjoy hitting that with everything I had, I was joined in the fun by the Yellow Heavy Cruiser who incidentally was in a bad way, it had taken direct hits to its engines and was moving at a slow speed.

The White and Red ships sneaking around the large asteroid to put some hurt on those Blue ships…

Turn five was the turn that we finally called a halt to the attack and ordered what was left of our force to collect any escape pods they could and get out of the asteroid field and let the enemy have the alien ship.

The enemy ships moving in ready to board the alien bio ship…
The remaining “good guy’s” the Badly damaged Yellow Heavy Cruiser, my almost untouched Green Heavy Cruiser and my slightly damaged Green Corvette.

We finished with two Heavy Cruisers, one moving only at half speed and mine that was too far away from the alien ship to actually get to it within the two remaining turns.

My Corvette could get there but that didn’t stand a chance against the remaining enemy ships.

It was a shame as some of the remaining enemy ships had taken lots of damage so were in a bad way, one or two hull points left on at least two or three so it could have gone either way, but in the end, we were badly out of position so were in no position to claim the alien ship as ours.

A good victory to the other team.

The new players seemed to have fun, I know that I did even though my side lost.

Come on over to my Discord server to chat about your games of Stars & Lasers and show us some pictures or show us some pictures of your ships, or chat about the rules.

You will find the link to my server on the Community tab at the top of the site.

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6 Comments

  1. Tim

    Thanks Mac, games with you are always fun. Fortunately, despite being your opponent, I was on the far corner away from you and consequently did not take a single point of damage, didn’t even lose a fighter or bomber. Your opponent Roger won the game for us by taking on 2/3 of your force, damaging it and drawing you out of position on our far right. That left a fight in the centre left where we outnumbered your side 2:1. Winning that fight left us with the objective.. Fun game as always.

    • Mac

      Hi Tim,

      Yep our plan went badly wrong, I noticed our problem but by then it was too late.

      Still it was fun.

      Mac

  2. Vic

    Hi Mac!

    I love multi-player games – they can be real slug-fests! 🙂 Admittedly I might’ve played it as 6 separate teams loosely allied but each with slightly different mission objectives (such as ‘Prevent ayer A from achieving the overall objective’ – such a pity he’s been randomly teamed up with you … ) – this can lead to some treachery at inopportune (but funny) moments, especially when it back fires … =D

    Vic

    • Mac

      Hi Vic,

      You are a more devious man than I am Sir!! 😉

      I just hadn’t thought of doing something like that, still it would have been nice to throw a big alien bio ship at them, oh well maybe next time.

      Mac

    • Mac

      Hi David,

      Glad you found it, Stars & Lasers is very cinematic and simple to play ( intentionally ) but most of all is fun!

      I have a Discord Server ( check the Community link at the top of my site ) where you can see more stuff about my rules including Stars & Lasers, you would also be able to ask any question you may have… oh and share pictures of your games and ships if you decide to get the rules.

      Mac

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