Sunday Starships: Starfleet Wars game

Some holiday weekend gaming--I was fortunate enough to gather a couple of fellow starship captains for some Starfleet Wars action when Hill Cantons blogger Chris and Johnny Reb organizer Joe made it over on Saturday. 

Chris got stuck in traffic, so the first match was between me and Joe.  My previous games only involved large ships, so I wanted to try out the rules for starfighters, as well as the rules for starbombers and star armored pursuit ships this time around.

I took a Terran Invincible-class dreadnought (which carries four starfighters) with three Mars-class starbombers and a pair of Dauntless-class SAPS as escorts.  I gave Joe two task forces: an Aquarian Stingray-class carrier accompanied by a couple of Piranha-class destroyers and an Entomalian Hive-class carrier escorted by a Wasp-class destroyer and two Louse-class star armored pursuit ships: 

The idea in this scenario was for me to get the DN off the other side of the board with enough power to reach hyperspace.  I started out behind a moon; Joe deployed his forces apart from each other hoping to get me to run the gauntlet between them.

I immediately headed to my right, around the outside of the water-breathers, for three turns.  On my fourth turn, however, I juked back toward the opposite table edge, faking out Joe, who had anticipated me continuing in the same direction.  (This is why I like simultaneous movement--it forces you to anticipate where your opponent is headed.)

While this was happening, the fish fighters quickly took out my three SBs, and the bug attack craft shot down my SAPS a couple of turns later.  I managed to eliminate one of the fish destroyers and scratch the paint on the Aquarian carrier.  The aliens in turn damaged my remaining ship by more than 10 percent--enough to reduce the amount of antiaircraft fire and give me some dilemmas in power allocation, but that's about it.

The final turn had me headed for the border with both forces in hot pursuit.  The alien team-up failed to stop the lonely dreadnought from reaching the system's edge and escaping to lightspeed.  By the time we finished, Chris had shown up.  Now that we had the fighter rules down, I decided to run a larger game with carriers on both sides.  I will share how that turned out in a later post.  For now, enjoy your Sunday.