Star Wars Legion First Impressions

So, around Christmas last year, me and my Armada play group decided to finally cave and get into Star Wars: Legion, the Fantasy Flight Game that is actually getting a lot of love at the moment.  It was the perfect time to get into it, as with Christmas coming up we jump-started our collection by buying each other units for Christmas.

However, other than a practice game we played in mid-December, we had not played an actual game until Tuesday. Hubert is an excellent model-painter and drafted us to start painting all the units before playing with them. However, with over 100+ miniatures between all of us, it was a rather involved affair, and after 4-5 painting sessions and getting a little over half done, we were ready to begin. Hubert and I caved Tuesday night and got together to play a game, me as the Rebellion and him as the Empire.

I'm going to record my army (and his to the best of my ability) as I imagine it will be fun to come back and review it after we figure out what we're doing and spot our early mistakes.

Luke Skywalker
 - Force Reflexes
 - Emergency Stims

Leia Organa

Rebel Troopers
 - MPL-57 Ion Trooper
 - Rebel Trooper
 - Recon Intel

Rebel Troopers
 - Z-6 Trooper
 - Targeting Scopes

Rebel Troopers
 - Rebel Trooper

Rebel Troopers

Fleet Troopers
 - Scatter Gun Trooper
 - Fleet Trooper
 - Emergency Stims
 - Concussion Grenade

Rebel Commandos
 - DH-447 Sniper
 - Hunter
 - Recon Intel

Rebel Commandos
 - DH-447 Sniper
 - Hunter
 - Recon Intel

1.4 FD Laser Cannon Team
 - Long-Range Comlink
 - Overcharged Generator

Standing Orders
Return Of The Jedi
Somebody Has To Save Our Skins
My Ally Is The Force
No Time For Sorrows
Son of Skywalker
Coordinated Bombardment


There is not a whole lot to this army other than trying out a bunch of things that looked interesting to me. The units I were given for Christmas were: Fleet Troopers, Leia, Rebel Commandos, and the T-47, so I was able to break out three of the four here. I immediately found myself gravitating towards trooper spam, and so took all the corps that we had. I wanted to try out Leia, but not feeling confident enough to take the field without a Jedi (after getting wrecked by DV in the practice game), I decided to bring Luke as well. The 1.4 FD Laser turret seemed to be the perfect anti-armor weapon for a infantry heavy army, so I brought that alongside one MPL-57 ion to deal with the AT-ST that I knew Hubert would bring. Still probably a lot less than I should have brought but tailoring it specifically to deal with an AT-ST would have been unfair to Hubert.

The other thing that really appealed to me out of all the Legion stuff currently out was snipers, and so I outfitted two commando strike teams with snipers to use similarly to artillery in ETW. Finally, I brought fleet troopers loaded up for CQB. I love the look of the Fleet Troopers (and am very proud of my paint job I did on them), but honestly was unsure if I would be able to get them in close enough to use.

At any rate, Hubert brought a AT-ST, but not a fully Christmas-tree'd one. Veers was his commander alongside 4 Stormtrooper squads sporting DLT's, some Snowtroopers/Galactic Marines with a flamethrower, and speeder bikes.

Right off the bat, me and Hubert struggled a bit with the wording on giving orders, and I was taken off guard by Coordinated Bombardment being interrupted by cover. At any rate, no good hits were scored off of it. Hubert by contrast landed a good hit on by cannon with Maxmimum Firepower which I had not put behind cover in the mistaken belief that vehicles and the like did not benefit from it.

The Imperials came out swinging, using bikes to flank my position and cutting down troopers. However, my the end of the round, I was able to land some good hits on the AT-ST with the cannon and additionally ionize it. The Galactic Marines barely got outside deployment before having half of their squad cut down by snipers across the field.

Round one took nearly an hour, but by the end we had a pretty good idea what we were doing. There are still some things I'm unclear about re: issuing orders. But suppression more or less makes sense, and limiting actions to one for many units makes for some hard trade-offs. I know it made me grateful to have Hunter on my snipers to generate that aim token. We played the first round thinking aim only allowed you to reroll two dice, which hurt Hubert disproportionately.

I'm sure though this won't be the last game we get rules wrong.

At any rate, I had to leave at this point and Daniel elected to take over for me.

The Rebels ended up winning after a miraculous turn in which the cannon survived everything thrown against it. The AT-ST went down to Luke, but the Imperial Speeder bikes proved elusive lived through to the end of the game. My Fleet troopers also apparently landed a god tier roll with their excess of white dice, but didn't do much after that.

All in all, a taxing and occasionally frustrating introduction to Legion, but I definitely can't wait to play again.

Thanks to Hubert and Daniel as always for hosting this little shin-dig :D

Board Games in Nashville

So, as previously mentioned, this last weekend, Dani and I visited Beth in Nashville this weekend, and got to meet her roommate, Goming. All of us pictured at the Loveless Cafe below: 

As always, Danielle and I take board games on our trips, and this time took Machi Koro and Root. Playing Machi Koro while drinking has a long tradition in our friend group, and one of these days I will do a complete write-up of our drinking game rules, all the strategies Dani and I have devised (including my infamous sub-prime loan strat), and the many different ways Danielle and I have tried to deal with the market over the years. 

For this game though, I'll keep it to a short summary. I gave Beth a cursed loan office which put her behind the entire game. Goming had the at this point expected amount of new player luck (almost winning), but coming up a little short to Danielle's 1-6 strat for her to take the win. 

Now, onto the game I want desperately to play but can't find time to schedule, Root!

We played a three player variant this time with Danielle playing the Marquise De Cat again, Beth playing the Eeyrie, and myself playing the Woodland Alliance. Dani had a pretty good grasp on how to manage the cats at this point, and Beth pretty quickly figured out how to pull off the decree. I do think increasingly that the board setup does lend this game to being a lot more new player friendly than I first thought, as Beth was able to figure out what was going on pretty quickly and was competitive to the end. 

It was truly amazing to me though, how much more complete the presence of the WA made the game feel. The Eeyrie vs. the Marquise feels so hard for the birds, while the presence of the Woodland Alliance forces the Marquise to make some really hard choices about where to fight and build. For her part, Danielle played the hare dominance card as early as she could (which turned out to be a mistake in hindsight), swapped it out for the mouse one, then beat her head against the Eeyrie for the rest of the game trying to acquire a third mouse clearing. Unfortunately for her (and fortunately for me), Beth held firm and they fought each other to a standstill in the Western clearings. 

Meanwhile, I was able to run wild as the Woodland Alliance, getting all three of my bases out and maxing out my units. The WA is definitely just a little harder to play than the other two, with some mechanics that are not immediately clear and a turn sequence that is more involved. For my part, I didn't get that sympathy had to come from my supporters and not my hand until turn 2, and missed that I had a hand limit until late in the game - allowing me to unfairly retain a large hand for far longer than I should have. 

More than the other two factions, the WA feels like it wants to craft and consequently work closely with the Vagabond. You just can't earn points at the same rate as the other factions with nothing but deploying sympathy. The key seemed to be getting units out of a clearing with a base in it and trading them for sympathy using "Organize" instead of having to ditch two supporters each time for the second tier of sympathy. I also got the feeling that more than other factions the WA wants to stock-pile ambush cards and rely on them plus their combat advantage to prevail against the other factions on the field of battle despite their smaller numbers. 

I really want to play the WA again, as I loved the dynamic of their play (plus RPing as the woodland creatures of Mossflower), but more than anything at this point I want to see a full game with all four factions played. Dani and I also caved today and ordered the expansion. Lizard Cult, here we come!

That being said, there are still some rules that are unclear to me and I need to sit down and sort out. For instance, the cards that add new abilities to your board, are they technically crafted? If not, when are they played? 

At any rate, my positive impressions of Root continue.

Charterstone Chronicle, Game 7

After another pro-longed hiatus, we're back!

Pro-tip, you should always write these things up the day after a game, as at this point much of the specific things that occurred in game 7 have slipped my mind. Danielle and I took a trip to Nashville this weekend and there simply wasn't time for me to record it before we left. With that in mind, here is an abbreviated record of the 7th game of our Charterstone Campaign.

The temporary rule made a big difference and dramatically accelerated the game, keeping a lot more money on the table. The big beneficiaries of this were Danielle (with her Constructor), Megan (with the OMFGHAX perfumery) and Daniel. Megan and Daniel both had amazing games, and had the first 100+ point games of our campaign. However, they somehow managed to tie and split the win.

Megan however got the guidepost by a large margin, and the game gave us the option to choose our own scoring criteria or take a standard one. Megan chose the former, and we passed around individualized score sheets that changed the multiplier you would get from capacity, wins, and personas. As the last person going clockwise around the table from Megan, I got to pick last, which bummed me out quite a bit. That being said, I'm of two minds on this game design choice. On the one hand, I love it because it gives players the opportunity to tailor their play-styles towards things that they score more highly on. On the other hand, doing some quick back of the envelope math indicated that barring edge cases, different scoring sheets would make a difference of less than 20 points in the final accounting. Not insignificant, but considering the leads Daniel and Megan have, it's unlikely to make too much of a difference in the final scoring. In that regard, it's a little bit of a false choice.

I'm so happy that we've finally passed the point where we aren't introducing five new mechanics every game, as it feels like I can actually play the game. But, I will say, Charterstone as a whole suffers from a little too much complexity creep, and the number of unique interaction  and factors to keep track of means that its often all-encompassing just to know what's going on in your own charter, let alone your opponent's. This feeds into the feeling of playing six games of solitaire that can unfortunately be said to sometimes characterize Charterstone.

For our part, Dani and I cannot figure out where Daniel is getting all his points, he sits across the table from us which means that by the time it gets to his turn we're not paying as close attention. So while we have a pretty good idea about how Megan was able to achieve her record setting score, Daniel remains a bit of a mystery (maybe he will be good enough to comment on this post :P).

In addition to Danniel and Megan's record-setting games, Amanda and Dani both had really solid games as well. The big ghost made an immediate and noticeable difference for Amanda. Combined with solid use of her objective scoring building (Circus?), she was able to have a respectable 4th place finish. Dani really began unlocking the power of her charter with items this game, and was able to leverage the gold she got from her constructor into resources from Megan's perfumery to complete 3 items.

For my part, it was a pretty lackluster game. Getting an extra minion every income phase from my income building is just not as good as one would think. While it did allow me to use exactly the minion I wanted at all points during the game and cash out quite a few of them for VP on the quota track at the end, it just feels weaker on the whole than the the other four income buildings on the board. Once Dani gets hers up I will make a ranking of all of them.

We have a quicker turnaround scheduled this time for this Sunday, so as we head into the final act of the campaign (and the machanations of the Forever King become more clear), I'll have more to say. Now over halfway done, I can say I definitely understand some of the critiques of this game I read online, and it definitely ranks below Pandemic Legacy 1 & 2 in terms of a legacy game experience, but is still solid and I think in many ways better suited for a lot of gaming groups than more PvP heavy ones like Seafall.

Planetside Ops Report - 1/22/19

I won't normally write these up, but I was very happy with how our night of casual ops went last night and wanted to document our victory for prosperity. For reference, the Amerish map below (screenshots are on my home computer and will be edited in later).

After a pretty successful op on Monday night, we had a casual evening of play last night to capitalize on continued double XP. Our roster has hit 14 members, with our last couple of Mondays getting 10 into squad each time. Last night though, we just had six. Elements of Fireteam Spades (Daniel, Fish, and Luke), myself and Danielle, with Ben (our indomitable galaxy pilot) joining us later.

We logged on around 7pm CST just in time for an alert to start on Hossin. It wasn't quite as disastrous as the last Hossin alert, but still was a complete mess. The NC was getting double-teamed the entire time and could not get our act together to protect key bases like Gourney Dam. It was all in all a very frustrating experience, combined with the fact that nobody likes Hossin.

On Amerish, however, it was a different story.

Continuing on our Anti-TR spree from Monday night, I had us focus on the northernmost lattice with the ultimate goal of pushing to Sungrey Amp Station (we had the western warpgate while the TR had eastern if this was not already apparent).

We took North Grove Post (which I am rapidly coming to consider our home base on Amerish as the first base AKR ever took), and pushed up to Moss Ravine. Unfortunately, a last minute air push and valk drop from the TR pushed our fragile 5 man squad off the base with 15 seconds on the cap.

We briefly moved south to NC Arsenal before returning to the northern lattice, following up on the 666th taking Moss Ravine and securing a cap on Sungrey Power Hub. With the Amp station now open, we pushed in a Sunderer to the Amp Station and opened with an assault on the C point. For those of you who don't know (or had forgotten until getting there), Sungrey is one of the three point Amp stations where control of a point gives you control of a spawn room. With this in mind, the key to this assault would be keeping the points under control in order to allow NC reinforcements to spawn directly in.

The fight quickly exploded, with both sides investing entire platoon's worth of troops to the fight. Our Sundy went down and we were having a rough time holding onto the C point. Then, Ben logged in, asked if he could pull a Gal, and I figured out how we would contest the points. Telling Ben to go to flight ceiling, I marked the B point and ordered everyone into the Gal. Ben can drop you on a dime and he inserted us right at the door of the B point building. We flipped the point, in time for a gratifying flood of blueberries to arrive from the B spawn room, as C had fallen a moment earlier. For the next 25 minutes, Ben kept repositioning around the Amp station and the Arkansas Rangers attacked each point in succession - dropping to take a new point the moment they pushed us off an old one. The NC got entrenched on the A point, with us focusing on the B and C points, and it looked for awhile like we might just slog our way into the Amp station. However, a late swarm of reinforcements shoved us off, with the TR pushing onto the Power Hub shortly thereafter.

A prolonged battle to re-secure the Power hub ensued, with Fish going to the amp station early to take advantage of our point control at Power hub to back-cap the TR. About 10 minutes after the initial push on Sungrey petered out, we returned to the Amp Station, dropping Daniel and the medics onto C while Fish got B and I got A. With three points under our control and a couple of blueberries backing us up (for 7 guys on the ground total), we held our breath and waited.

It was a near thing, including hard fought enemy probing movements to all three points, but we held our own and against all odds - took the amp station virtually for free. The TR simply didn't redeploy fast enough. The cap also cut off two TR territories to the west, allowing the NC to push forward on that front.

We held onto the Amp station for 40 minutes until a determined TR counterattack (nearly two full platoons), finally pushed us back off. But, still, a 6-man squad of noobs taking an amp station after a back and forth 50 minute battle seemed like something to celebrate. Hats off to everyone who joined in last night and assisted in that amazing capture, and I look forward to next Monday's full squad ops and the possibility of doing even greater things with more boots on the ground.

Axis and Allies and Zombies First Impressions

There is basically no mid-2000's trend I have been as ready to die as zombies. So, when I opened one of my Christmas presents to see Axis and Allies and Zombies, I was a bit skeptical. On the one hand, Axis and Allies is one of my all-time favorite board games, and I'm generally willing to give any variant on it a try. On the other, this looked a little gimmicky.

I'm pleasantly surprised to say that having played it, its a pretty fun experience, and a lot less gimmicky than the premise would suggest. The game is essentially a streamlined copy of 1941, with additional zombie components. There was also an additional deck of cards to make this variant compatible with 1942 2nd Edition. Unfortunately, this copy of the board game was completely unplayable, because "Coastal China" was misprinted as "Costal China." TWICE, no less.

Joking aside, playing on the 1941 board was refreshing for me as I haven't spent a lot of time cracking it yet and was not coming in with knowledge of ideal openings and counter-play. As it stands though, zombies threw a lot of theory-crafting out of the window.

The zombies were perfectly flavored, as they were a force to be reckoned with and a constant source of annoyance, while never being compelling enough to make me stop what I was doing and focus purely on them. They introduced a new calculus into every attack, and generally seem to benefit the defender as they constituted a second stack of enemies to work your way through after your assault on a territory. They also invite a reconsideration of much of the A&A meta as far as army composition goes. Playing as Germany, I increasingly began to wonder if I should simply build artillery instead of infantry so as not to feed the armies of the undead. They definitely caused us to shift our casualty-taking practices as the game went on, opting to lose artillery instead of infantry so as not to create a bigger problem for ourselves. There were a couple frustrating but flavorful moments where a player was trying to eliminate a single zombie, who scored a hit which we reflexively took on an infantryman, only to have to fight it again on the next turn.

The "Desperate Measures" on each card felt fun, but I do think they may have helped us a little too much versus the zombies, taking significant numbers off the board by the end. Nonetheless, large areas of Africa alongside an emerging "Zombie Republic of China" were on the board by the end of the game. Japan in particular seems to have a rough time with Zombies, with a high percentage of island territories that are isolated and difficult to retake alongside the necessity of always bringing infantry along on transports that can in turn be converted.

The scenario techs to me actually seemed like the weakest and most gimmicky aspect, and on subsequent playthroughs I may remove them and the cards that grant you them for free.

I don't have enough experience on the 1941 board to intelligently discuss much of the balance between factions. However, my general sense is that zombies might significantly help the Allies over the Axis, because as always the Axis is focused on early territory acquisition and the zombies served as an impediment to that. At any rate, we ended at the bottom of round 5, with the Allies clearly in the lead after my early invasion of Moscow was pushed back by the zombie hordes of dead Russians while Dani had difficulty holding onto her mainland Asia territories as Japan.

One comment from Kader and Amanda (who in their generosity gave me AAZ for Christmas), was that this format was really good for new or learning players, which I completely agree with. Stripping down the complexity of 1942 into the simplified format of 1941, alongside the flavorful inclusion of Zombies struck me as a good way to get new players into the wonderful world of A&A. Indeed, it got Danielle and I thinking about other possible gimmick scenarios (alien invasion anyone?) that could help make A&A less daunting for people to get into.

At any rate, while nothing will ever replace my love of 1940 Global, AAZ is a fun and worthy addition to anyone's game shelf, and should delight both experienced and new A&A players alike.

Root First Impressions

So for Christmas Danielle got me a game that has been on my radar for quite some time - the Kickstarter success story that is Root.

I still have not gotten a chance to play a proper game yet, and indeed still do not quite understand how the Vagabond works. More thoughts will follow when I finally get to play a full game, but I wanted to take a moment to jot down some first impressions.

First up, the art for this game is fantastic. As I've long said to Danielle, I'm a sucker for a game with a good art style, and this game has some of the most distinctive and engaging visual design I've seen since getting Scythe.

Asymmetric strategy games are by definition extremely hard to do, especially when working from a non-preset map (which in the case of Axis and Allies, can quickly act to calcify optimal opening strategies). I've yet to ascertain if Root succeeds in this, but the online reviews and our two player game are promising. I recently was introduced to the game Vast, and the boards with unique player mechanics are very similar to those in Vast. On the whole I think this mechanic is promising, although I do worry that it will seem prohibitively complex to new players (even if its not). It also strikes me that games of this ilk must be a nightmare to playtest.

At any rate, I played the Eeyrie and Danielle played the Marquise de Cats. Right off the bat, I love how different factions have very different uses for cards, and the core decision to be made on a given turn (do I use this card for the effect or use it to save a cat/give an order/etc.?) is a solid gameplay element - giving the player clear choices to make on a regular basis with clear pay-offs and costs.

I really love the Decree system for the Eeyrie. It allows just enough flexibility while still inducing the player to make hard choices regarding their hand and incentivizing faster card acquisition. I managed to avoid turmoil this game, although if the Alliance had been in the game I'm fairly sure it would have happened. However, I found myself towards the end almost wishing for it, as optimal Eeyrie play would seem to be based around swapping in the right leader for the right moment. In the two player set-up, however, losing a turn would be a death knell for any chance of winning, so I was more or less stuck with my starter. That being said, the charismatic leader seems like a more or less obvious first choice to snowball your recruitment off the bat. The cats have such a significant advantage when it comes to deploying huge armies, that I can't imagine not recruiting every single turn. With this in mind, any leader without a vizier there feels like they are at an immediate disadvantage.

Root felt small to me when I first looked at the map, with only 12 clearings. I quickly discovered this was not the case, as you simply have to be dominant in a clearing to do most of the things you want to do with it. Indeed, after an initial push to completely clear the cats out of clearings, my style leaned towards sending in just enough troops to secure it (yay winning ties) and building a roost.

I thought Root's combat system would be far too punishing for the defender, and while it does squarely incentivize attacking (and indeed, clearing out opponent's armies on your turn to preclude their attacks), it was not as suffocating as I thought. In practice, the ambush card and the fear of ambush cards dominated battle decision making. I also discovered how hard it was simply to uproot the cats once they got recruiters into a grove (although I need to check if they can recruit into a grove they do not control).

The other thing that surprised me was how quickly the limit of building sites came to matter, as Danielle was able to rocket out to an explosive start by spamming sawmills, but stalled out for a little bit before winning because she had to take building slots from me. For my part, I simply could expand fast enough, assaulting a grove she had built in and failing to take out the structures two turns in a row thanks to a heroic defense on the part of the cats. Once the cats built a feline horde up and could begin pushing back into the 5 groves I had occupied, it was GG.

Finally, it amuses me no end the extent to which this game replicates the characters and setting of Brian Jacques's Redwall series, and throughout the game I referred to the cat stronghold as Kotir.

Simply put, this game so far succeeds on every level for me, and I can't wait to play again.

Armada - 1/1 Battle Report

So, before Michael heads back to St. Louis, we decided to break out Armada for the first game for either of us in several months. Apparently St. Louis is a silly place where people play with dumb house rules like: "100 points of squadrons only" or "two of a ship type max in your fleet." While neither of our fleets on Tuesday broke either of these rules, suffice it to say I think they are questionable.

Anyway, I took the following fleet:

Nebulon-B Support Refit
 - Commander Sato
 - Spinal Armament
 - Salvation

Pelta Assault Ship
 - Assault Proton Torpedoes

Pelta Assault Ship
 - Assault Proton Torpedoes

CR90 Corvette A
 - Turbolaser Reroute Circuits
 - Jaina's Light

GR-75 Medium Transports
 - Boosted Comms

GR-75 Medium Transports
 - Boosted Comms

Jan Ors
Shara Bey
Tycho Celechu
Y-Wing X 3

This fleet is a continuation of my exploration into "sacrificial bomber" fleets, with a small squadron investment designed to set up Sato's ability while providing me some ability to deal with opposing squadrons.

The real centerpiece is the tanky MSU of the Salvation with the two Peltas. I love the design of the Pelta, even if the ship isn't that good. After Daniel ran a fleet last year that featured Sato and MC30s, I started thinking about if there were a better centerpiece ship for a Sato fleet. Hammerheads are an obvious choice, but they have an annoying tendency to blow up when faced with enemy ISDs. The MC30s did well, but they were easily focused down at close range. With this in mind, I arrived at the Pelta's, with their fat front arc, 3 shields, 5 health and brace. The cost is that I don't have dice control on them short of a Concentrate Fire token. But...they can be kitted out for the relatively efficient price of 61 points total with just APTs.

In the background is my unending quest to use as many Nebulons as possible, and this fleet featured the niche Salvation set up to swing up to 14 damage in a single glorious attack.

My objectives were Opening Salvo, Contested Outpost, and Solar Corona, and I may need to reconsider the second one. On the one hand, this fleet wants to sit in formation and fight a positional battle over something like the outpost, but given that our battles almost always end up being Empire versus Rebels, this would mean it would have to contend with ISDs. As it happens, Michael brought a fleet that had strong tools against my MSU, a Vader-led Cymoon with two supporting Arquitens, an ExRax Raider, and a Gozanti. Notably, he ran squadronless, but not without some tools to deal with opposing squadrons in the form of EWS on the Cymoon.

He chose to go first and take Contested Outpost, and despite his deployment disadvantage, was effectively able to predict my deployments with the positioning of the outpost. Here is what we ended up with:

So obviously this game would come down to if I could kill the ISD or not.

Turn one was nothing moving into position, with the first shots fired on turn 2 as we made contact on the far left.

My poor GR-75's were not cut out for a game featuring Vader and red dice, and the left one took a beating from the Arquitens before being finished off by the ISD.

The ISD powered in, but critically remained out of range of the Salvation setting up for an explosive turn 3.

My Corvette was able to wallop the Arquitens on the far left at the bottom of turn 2 with Sato-provided black dice, but came up just a little short of killing it allowing Michael to heal it with RBDs on turn 3. My right Pelta was caught in a bad place and died this turn, surviving two volleys from the ISD before the Arquitens finished it off. It did manage to land a critical on the ISD with APTs though, preventing him from using flipped defensive tokens and limiting the effectiveness of Vader. My squadrons were slowly plinking away at Relentless, but it was slow going.

Salavation scored a god roll against Relentless, even through the obstructed front hull zone, landing an accuracy, hit, and hit + crit x 2 for 7 damage. However, Michael was able to first strike it at the beginning of turn 4.

Critically though, my other Pelta managed to escape the front arc and get into a position to finish off the ISD with help from my squadrons. Meanwhile, Jaina's Light smiped the left Arquitens before it could escape, putting me solidly in the lead. It was not over yet though, with my Pelta at one health remaining as I mopped up the Gozanti.

The Raider had been out of position the entire game, and besides flattening my GR-75, had contributed little. Here, it became a speed 4 guided missile and rammed the escaping Pelta for the kill. However, surrounded by my squadron ball, it quickly suffered the fate of all Raiders - to die with most of its shields still up.

That essentially wrapped up the action. Michael had managed to net two tokens from the contested outpost, but it was just not quite enough.

A very narrow win for me at 329-305.

Michael struggled to get all his ships involved in the battle, even though his Cymoon did very well - using first turn capability to destroy several key ships of mine before they could get their attacks off. EWS was a giant pain in the ass for my combination MSU/MFC but eventually I was able to surround the Cymoon and limit its effectiveness.

This was a very difficult fleet to go against, that being said, I think I positioned my GR-75's poorly. Combined with smart maneuvering from Michael on turn 3, I didn't get as much mileage as I hoped for from my Peltas. The real MVPS of the Rebel team were Jaina's Light and my squadrons, and the bomberless black dice from my A-Wing aces and Jan came up big. I'm not convinced Sato does enough to make Assault Peltas work, but I want to try it again, as I think the notion of a beefy MSU based on ships with braces is sound. I am considering the relative merits of ACM vs APTs though. This fleet desperately wants fleets to come to it and go second, but even the beefiest MSU struggles against Vader Cymoon. Bad test case, but given the meta of our group, always going against ISDs with a strong likelihood of them being Vader Cymoons is not unlikely.

At any rate, GG Michael! I enjoyed this game a lot and it was nice to have an opportunity to play while we are waiting for Hubert to get his SSD.