First Games, Part 1

First games have taken place, one with the starters from the Quick Start Rules (QSR) with Lowie and myself, and then a 150pt game between Skorpious and Lowie.  I'm sure there were things we missed, forgot, did wrong, etc. All in all though, "a good time was had by all."  (And the barbecue lunch helped too, I'm sure!)

Initially it was a matter of setting out the terrain.  The first picture is the table in its entirety.  Sadly, we were using all the terrain available to us, and I have a feeling that it would have played a little differently if we'd used more stuff.

The left side of the board is pretty open, and there are lines of fire (LoF) that stretch from one side of the board to another!  This obviously has repercussions on how figures move and fight.  Playing Ariadna, I had two figures that could Infiltrate (start anywhere in my half of the board, further if I wanted to make a Physical (PH) roll... I chose not to) and so positioned a Camo'd sniper on the double-storey building in the middle of the table (just inside 24").  The other was my SAS trooper, who deployed near the giant tree stump, also Camo'd.  This advanced threat helped enormously.  The other two are visible in the pic in the lower right quadrant.

When Lowie deployed, he put a sniper in the two-storey building in the top right of the pic, and then the rest of his minis spread out across the table.  No infiltrators though, so that was a plus for me.

As we were playing, I've got to say I found the QSR very limiting.  We're all quite well versed in miniature wargaming, and so the lack of options presented was tough to work with.  But we managed, with input from Skorpious who can be seen here leafing through the rulebook on the right.

One thing we questioned early on was the line-of-fire and cover rules.  True line of sight has been a part of our gaming for a long time, and so we opted to use it rather than the 'you must be in base to base contact with a scenery item to gain cover.' This became one of our first debates - could the Acontecimento Regular on the board see my sniper when she came out of camo? Only partially, but enough to take the shot through trees to an elevated position, so we agreed that true line of sight meant that she gained cover.  Having since read through the forum threads on Cover, the way it makes most sense to me (as written) is thinking about cover in a target-oriented way (if you're not hunkering down, actively making the most of cover, you're exposed) vs. a shooter-oriented way (if you're looking down the sights at someone and there is a bit of house, a bus and some bushes in the line of fire to the guy in the middle of the street, he's harder to hit).

We'll have to have a try at the rules as they are written next time, with a target-oriented mentality.

The game ended with an Ariadnan victory, with the SAS and Kazak HMG left on the board.  PanOceania went into full retreat after that.

I'm going to leave it there, and hopefully Skorpious and Lowie will post in a bit with their first thoughts.

Cheers!