The Tao of Gaming

I just spent a few hours reading through the rulebook. Battlestations is similar to Heroquest (or Doom, I suppose) ... you have a group of players cooperating while a referee runs all of the enemies. What differentiates Battlestations? The genre. As far as I know, the vast majority (if not all) of the previous games of this type were fantasy dungeon crawls. Here you have a Star Trek-like game. You can scan things, have shields, cannons, boarding actions. Players not only have their individual characters, but they cooperate on designing (and improving!) their ship.

Ian Connolly wrote a detailed review on the geek, which is nicely supplemented by Jason Little's Example of Play. I may write up a review later, but for now some thoughts. You can also find a fair amount of info on the official web site.

As stated in the review, the basic rules are easy (Roll two dice and add skill vs a target number, spend luck points to get re-rolls). However, as befitting an RPG, there are plenty of chrome rules. Characters and ships are much more complicated than you find in Heroquest. A starting character has five skills, a profession, and a special ability. And a race, which adjusts stats (and has a racial ability). Once you've played a few missions, you'll improve your skills and pick up more special abilities, and new equipment.

Ships are built out of modular tiles (nine or more, always in multiples of three). There are four required tiles, but that gives you a fair number of tiles to play with and you have to think about the layout.

But Battlestations does try to move things along. Creating a character limits the choices nicely (or the ref could pre-build a number of characters).

So — complex, but the players can pick a lot up as they go. [The ref has to read quite a bit before the game.]

The rules are complete, with an index, but not intuitively ordered. The sequence of play (for a mission) occurs very late in the rules (a pet peeve — SOPs form a nice framework). Despite having read quite a lot about the game (including the links above), I still was lost at times.

You get a lot of stuff in the box. Good heft. On the down side, a lot of duplicates. Several cardboard sheets for characters ... but you have to show lots of combinations (Human Engineer, Silicoid Engineer, etc etc etc). A very nice plus is the inclusion of several thick cardboard player aids. (The player aids on the geek may be less daunting to new players, but I'm glad to see complex games ship with good help).

The rules seem flexible enough to handle any situation, ala an RPG. The obvious downside is that you need a referee. That may be fun (plenty of people like GMing), but I suspect I'll be stuck as the ref (at least for a while).

Big plus — Plays from two to eight (+ ref!). The larger games are going to take longer.

Overall, I'm pleased and intrigued.

After my comments about the game, a friend asked "What is the balance between RPG and boardgame in Battlestations?" Good question. Since I didn't know the answer I (gasp) asked people who've played (via the Yahoo group!)

The general consensus — it slices & dices and depends on what the group wants it to be. There was some disagreement about what constitues an RPG. Is character advancement, a storyline (however thin) and a referee enough? (I say no). But let's go to the quotes. One poster fell firmly into the RPG side:

We play it as a RPG mainly. My group and I really do not have time to sit down for 6 to 8 hours to play an RPG. When we found Battlestations we were in love. It is less time invested so can get in an adventure or two when we get together. Plus the satisfaction it gives everyone; after a session we all feel like we have accomplished something tons more than when we were playing a straight RPG. The only change we made with Battlestations was to play it a bit more seriously than the game seem to portray in the rules.

Jeff Siadek (one of the designers) — "I have a regular Wednesday playtest group that is playing it more as a board game and a Sunday night group that is playing as an RPG."

Finally, a description that captures the protean nature of the game —

Thats really the great thing about Battlestations is that it is what you want it to be.

A board game I typically think of as a discrete occurrence. Folks are hanging out, and someone is like "lets play Battlestations !"

You can whip out the premade characters, assemble a scout ship, pick a stock adventure from the book and off you go.

When you're done, thats that. Theres no need to keep a campaign going.

As an RPG, its the continuity between games that is the emphasis. The players want to take the time to play multiple scenarios that are strung together. They want to take the time to create a homemade character, come up with a story and level him up. They want to build a bigger and better starship. They like non-standard adventures with twists and turns. Etc.

Basically, it comes down to how much time you want to invest.

There you have it.

And that didn't change tonight.

Jacqui and I played Battlestations!. I picked a scenario with no real hidden information and played it "by the book." We played a full crew (four characters) splitting them up two each.

Let's state that the mission felt nigh impossible. Each side has an equal ship, but the lab is an extra ship (bigger than either side's ship). Of course, the enemy doesn't get all of the cool PC powers, but has a lot of extra hardware. This isn't Star Fleet Battles, a single ship can take out a Lab (or even a base). But the odds were stacked ...

After the pre-mission setup, we warped in (facing the wrong direction, bad luck that) and set about turning around. We lobbed a few missles at the relay stations, and got a few in return. The enemy ship undocked and started out to meet us. Late on the 2nd turn there were plenty of missles on the board (We were flying a Zoallian ship, which gets a free missle per turn) but sadly the lab was fully operational and could reach out a distance. The odds became apparent when the lab proved that it could hit the ship for significant damage and kill a missle or two every turn. [The ship can launch two missles]. All of this before the other ship engaged!

After another turn or two, Jacqui was bored. So I took over and played Solitaire. The two ships were headed for each other and, seeing as how my ship was in trouble, the pilot and marine jumped into a boarding missle at the last moment. The two ships rammed(!), crippling mine and damaging the other ship. The boarding missle lands and the marine quickly dispatches the evil Canosian engineer, then deals with security and hunts down the pilot.

Back on the flaming hulk of the UREF, the engineer is busy repairing the engines while the scientist tries to regain control of the ship. But another hit from the lab finishes it off.

However ... the lab can't tell that the other ship is taken over. The pilot and marine hack into the other ship, gaining control of the helm, missles, cannon and some of the engines (the rest of the engines still provide power, but one engine is enough to generate a bit extra and transfer power). They are able to have an attack ready by the time they get into scanning range.

Sure enough, they are revealed, but launch several missles. The pilot plots a ramming course (again!) and the marine launches himself in a boarding missle at the last minute.

Alas, our heroes' luck had run out (literally) and the missle was shot down. Ramming a starbase worked out about as well as you can expect and had the slight potential to destroy the base, but didn't. The enemy ship was destroyed on impact.

Overall, the game was fun. It was long (it took three hours, and it it probably would have taken much longer if I kept my ship. Losing half the characters and ships sped it up considerably). I imagine with the full complement of players it would take longer, and with first time players it will probably drag.

On the plus side, I think that it will work as solitaire. There are tactical considerations, and dice galore. I'd like to play with a large group, but I think that solitaire will be good enough for now. After all, I have other games to play. There are plenty of faster cooperative games, and I'd have to referee this.

After a few missions, characters become quite differentiated beyond starting characters. Each rank gives an ability (like a feat from D&D 3rd edition). Enemies just get better numbers. While I had most of the rules down after the first solo play through, I'm still finding implications. [I'm playing fast, so I'll often see things during the enemy phase that I missed during the player phase. Or vice versa].

The current mission is piracy ... capture or destroy a freighter in a convoy before it can get to the planet, and try not to get smashed by the enemy destroyer (one size class bigger than my scout). At the end of the first turn, I belatedly realized that the PCs had left a ramming opportunity, which the destroyer gleefully took. But the PCs luck turned it around (ramming rolls are one of the few where the players cannot use their numerous luck or abilities to interfere with the dice). Both ships took equal hull damage, but the destroyer lost over a quarter of it's modules (including the teleporter, critically wounding the boarding party in the process) and both ships got spun around. The enemy destroyer ended up facing away from the scout and frigates, with no working guns to bear, leaving it open for a missle volley. Very lucky, and a quick win for ... uh, me.

When I'm playing this sometimes I feel like a Star Fleet Battles snob, preferring the detailed energy allocation, and details. Othertimes I think "Why did I ever play that?" [Star Fleet has some solitaire missions, by the way.] The games take very different paths to the same genre. SFB has an excrutiatingly detailed sequence of play. (Several pages long, in small type. Knowing the order of actions is a crucial key to victory). Battlestations has free-form actions (for the most part), but you can do some tricks to get double actions, or conditional actions via overwatch.

Solitaire still works, for now. (Social gaming update -- I played Shadowfist. I lost. Nothing to report here.)

After I got Battlestations last year, tinkered with it, and played it solitaire. Now the group has grown, so we took it for a test spin. I ran a scenario for three players. After taking some early fire, the players managed to repair, regroup and conquer.

I probably got a few rules wrong (since there are so many, and it's been almost half a year since I read them), but overall the rules flowed smoothly.

But how was it as a game? Well, we're a board gaming group, so we didn't do much role playing. Battlestations suffers from the same problem that many other cooperative games have, a single player could run the whole group. [In fact, that's what I did]. Now, if you are roleplaying then you get an entire angle that can't be handled by a single player. But as a board game, it's a fixed fun situation. (Thankfully we didn't have more players! The length would have gone up and each player would have done less ...)

I think this could be really great as an RPG system (for full battles, much like D&D uses miniatures) or as a campaign. I don't care for a one-shot game of Blood Bowl, but I enjoyed a league. For a single game, perhaps a player vs player scenario would work well ...