Shock and Awe

I'm sure my opponent felt this way after the game.

So I finally got brave enough to venture outside in the snow and went down to Battlefront to get a game in of Dystopian Wars. I got there a little after 12:30-ish, and nobody else showed up until almost 7 (well there was one 40k guy, but I didn't bring any 40k stuff with me). In the meantime, I cut out some Medium (medium-area and small-area) and Large (mostly small area) Height Iceburgs. We ended up using some of them in the battle later on. I also took the time to cut out some Iceburgs the size of my Iceburg templates, which was handy. I look forward to painting them up.

Now on to the game, the very first thing I want to do is thank my opponent for continuing even though the first turn's worth of dice were in no way shape or form in his favor. I rolled more 5's and 6's this game than all of my other games combined, and that coincided with him rolling next to none himself. It also didn't help that I both won and held the initiative the whole game.

So, here's the basic run down of what happened: Turn one we both moved up. Holy crap his ships are freaking fast! He also used his Carriers to shoot mortars at me from the corners of his deployment zones. They didn't really do much.

Turn two, I moved up again, shot a bunch of stuff, my Frigates were on FIRE last night and sunk every ship they pointed their guns at, it was that ridiculous. He moved his stuff up and took shots at me, killed off two of my escorts and a frigate. He also knocked the Ablative Armor off of one of the Borodinos and dropped it to 2 HP left in one activation of shooting. Thems was some hot dice! Also, we had a major dogfight over the middle of the board with my Tiny Flyer taking out one of his Recon Planes (in an attempt to limit the Carriers' ability to lob shots) and some of his fighters moved to intercept. Acrobatic Pilots is a terrible special rule, and I hate it (of course, the few 5&6's he rolled were for keeping his planes alive!) :P

Turn three is where things started getting interesting (Read: "Oh God, oh God, we're all gonna die!"). The damaged Borodino had a Half AD token on it from the previous critical hits it suffered, so it's guns were in no way going to affect the battlefield in a meaning full way... so I rammed the Konigsburg right in front of me! :D The poor thing took a critical hit and got to roll a whole two dice in return due to my Iron Ram rule. I LIKE ramming stuff! After that, I spent the rest of my activations killing or crippling anything I could get my guns pointed at (including sinking the Konigsburg that I had rammed earlier in the turn). It was here that my squad of three frigates killed one Hussar and prized the other with 9 AD left... my lord, I was being evil (I had previously hard-pounded the thing so it only had one AP to start the battle with, and again his rolls were shameful). It turned out I was only a small handful of points away from my 70% victory condition at the end of turn 3. So when I rolled initiative on turn 4, I moved forward with the relatively undamaged Borodino (1 HP lost and no Ablative) shot some stuff did some damage, and then prized his other Konigsburg to win me the game.

It was awesome to play and not get curb-stomped by my opponent, but at the same time, I know for a fact it was 95% dice and having a good STAR card hand, and I feel bad for the Prussian player. It was rough. All told, it only took us an hour and a half to play (though I didn't set a time limit to the game, we did use random terrain and every 2x2 had at least one terrain in it! One had two. We made good use of the icebrugs I'd cut out prior.)

Here are some pictures (I need to get a better camera and be more on-the-ball with taking pics during games...)

The board at the end-ish of turn 1.

The Frigates were N.A.S.T.Y. this game, they sunk two of his squadrons and captured one of his boats.

White Prussian, anyone?

Somewhere around turn two, the Borodino cutout took 7 (out of 9) HP damage from one activation's shooting... and that included starting off with Ablative Armor up!

Should be right around the end of turn 2.

After sinking it's sister ship, the three frigates in the foreground capture the ship next to them leaving 9 AP aboard to defend the prize.

I missed the fun stuff, the Borodino cutout actually Rammed the ship in front of it, causing a critical hit, and then shot all three dice worth of damage at something. Iron Rams are just NASTY.

My first Prize vs the Prussians.

The Prize that won me the game.

Vaya con Dios,
Timothy