It's A Trap!

Things are settling down here now, full story in the View on Sunday, power has thankfully been restored but we keep getting hints that further cuts will take place due to the system not being at full operational level yet, but fingers crossed.

The Skerton bridge was opened in time for me to pick up Simon and attend the club, it was another X-Wing game and Simon manfully managed in between being incommunicado, his job and wrestling with the weather to put a scenario together. You will notice we prefer scenario's to the usual 100 point dogfight, in the dogfights you put together what you hope is a winning list, but in a scenario you can have fun with all the ships and abilities rather than the flavour of the month. Not that you can't have fun with a dogfight but if you have spent money on all the ships you may as well get to use them.

This one caught me by surprise, the ship transporting Princess Leia after she had gone was used as a decoy to ambush some Rebels, supposedly it's crew had managed to take back the ship from the Imperial prize crew and sent out an SOS. A bunch of Rebels (me) duly dropped in with some hired help from the Scum and Villainy faction (Andrew) only to find that the Tantive IV was in fact a lure and still under the control of the Empire (Simon), accompanied by a Tie swarm along with Darth Vader himself.

I started at the wrong end of the Tantive and if I had proceeded I would have faced most of her weapons, so I sent my two X-Wings to help Simon with Vader while I had an idea that my Millennium Falcon could present a threat and maybe make a swoop on the big ship at some point when we all attacked it.

We drop into the ambush.

 The big ship did nothing much during the beginning and mid game, but the Tie fighters proved remarkably resilient to the Scum forces and went for the Hounds Tooth while Vader went for the smaller ships. By the time my X-Wings showed up the Hound had lost her shields and was taking a lot of hits on her hull. The Ties now began to die, with both Andrew and I sending one crashing out of the game, it was too late however to save the Hound, up she went and out shot the little Z95 shuttle, Vader had accounted for a Z95 at this point.

Vader and the Ties attack.

 Meanwhile after keeping as far away from the Tantive as possible I threw the Falcon in for a flyby shooting, big mistake, I did manage to hit the thing but any damage was mitigated by the beast being able to regenerate its lost shields, the only way to take this ship down is a concerted attack on its rear, but that was not going to happen due to the dogfight with Vader and his buddies. I decided Han had to get out of there and put the foot down to get out of range, I almost made it when another broadside slammed into me, but it was one short of killing the Falcon and Han lived to fight another day.

My X-wings join the fray.

 Back at the dogfight, I had now shot down two more Ties and as the game ended we were desperate to get Vader, we all calculated that with a sharp left turn he would, sadly escape, but wait, he makes a sharp right turn, oh joy! Even so, with all the laser fire engulfing him we needed three hits to bring him down, it was all up to one X-Wing, bang, four hits, one saved, Vader dies (or does he?)

Han McSolo manages to escape.

There you go, another game fought right to the end and a good scenario in the time given to produce it, Andrew and I got the win points wise and I was more than pleased to have killed three Tie's and Vader to boot. To take the big ship down it has to be attacked by several ships at the same time, this did not happen due to its escort and the fact that the 'Good Guys' started so far apart, it would be an idea to simply have an attack on a large ship to see how the mechanics work. I don't think these large ships have been very successful gamewise and you don't see them out very often, my own transport has never been on the table.

Elsewhere there was a nice 15mm AWI game and again a large Frostgrave contingent. I think that is the last X-Wing sortie for a while, I am back in the Sudan next week.