Episode 208: More Trouble Than Tribbles

First game with the new Galactic sci-fi terrain.  Another Perilous Tale with John controlling (and role-playing) the Star Trek (Original Series) crew whilst I ran the game and rolled for the villains.

The context for the mission objectives of Kill The Master, Hunt The Fiends, and Recover Equipment was as follows:

The villains were a large group of tentacled aliens:

  

Uhura and Kirk checked out the reactor room whilst McCoy explored the central corridor, revealing the first of the baby tentacled aliens and receiving four wounds for his trouble. Spock and Scotty took the left hand side and climbed the stairs towards the gantry, whilst Kirk doubled back to help McCoy by killing the alien.

Kirk and McCoy pressed on up the centre, revealing another baby alien which Kirk killed whilst McCoy (on his second attempt) healed himself.  A Tempted Forward peril failed to tempt anyone.  Scotty and Spock avoided nearby threat markers and crossed the gantry to join Uhura in the reactor room.

They then explored sickbay where Spock found the first bottle of hooch.

Assorted bottles made from Lego were hidden inside the larger cargo crates for the Recover Equipment objective.

The crew failed to take Dutch courage from the bottle however and three of the five immediately failed a horror check.  But Uhura stayed put long enough to detect another peril (a Putrid Stench) emanating from the far right of the ship.  This meant the crew could ignore that corner and explore the higher central level.

Scotty prioritised finding more alcohol whilst Kirk and McCoy revealed another baby alien at the top of the ladder.  Kirk killed the alien and then continued upwards to explore another cargo container for a third and final illicit beverage. 

Scotty and Uhura met up on the lower gantry and were then ambushed by the Mother Alien.

The Mother Alien took a fair few wounds from them both before wounding Uhura and then retreating down the stairs (following its Lurker characteristic).  She received some more shots before the Threat Check enabled her to remove three wounds and then become Aggressive, charging back up the stairs and killing Uhura.

Scotty's horror check at the loss of his crewmate fortunately enabled him to pull back from the alien joining his other colleagues who all released a barrage of phaser shots, obliterating the Mother Alien.

In the background, Kirk, having already killed several baby aliens and now just one short of his 12 wounds limit, was ambushed by another baby alien.  John had plenty of misfortunes during the game (rolling 0 on the D10 difficulty dice) and he was going to finish with more.  Kirk took a swing at the alien and failed to even scratch him.  He tried again, and failed again.  With Kirk's final action, and John's last roll of the game, the dice came up trumps and the alien was killed outright.  The perfect ending to a Star Trek episode.

All three objectives had been achieved (3 x 3 points) plus a further 1 for the leader surviving.  No further bonus given the sad loss of Uhura so a total score of 10 giving a Rank A "a truly heroic performance".  Roll credits... 

Sci-fi terrain

I haven't really had many sci-fi figures in the past but since I've been playing Perilous Tales, I've bought or been gifted quite a few figures like aliens, robots, and characters from the major sci-fi franchises.  I've played a couple of games of away missions on dusty planets but wanted to get some scenery for sci-fi or spaceship interiors.

Back at Salute in November, I'd looked at terrain from Battle Systems.  They make very detailed double-sided printed cardboard terrain.  I bought just a reversible road and river set at the time but came back and looked at their sci-fi terrain, and selected their Galactic Core Set.

Over a third of the 334 pieces are the plastic joining clips but that still means over 200 pieces of cardboard terrain pieces and scatter.  These come in 18 cardboard sheets to be pressed out.

The set also comes with a highly detailed 2 foot by 2 foot neoprene gaming mat.

There's a huge amount of material here - dozens of walls with different configurations like small or large removable/replaceable doors and windows, gantries, ladders, stairs and lots of scatter like consoles, chairs and cargo.

 Here's an overview of what it looks like all put together.  I'm really pleased with it.

It will of course all come apart and fit back in the original box but that means fitting everything back together again to play with it each time, so my compromise was to keep it mostly together but break it into a small number of parts, stored across three boxes.