Jeffro’s Car Wars Blog

Got a second game of Mayday in with a former Traveller player on Saturday just after playing a quick game of Ogre.  I figured a corsair could take out a scout without breaking a sweat.  Turns out that the scout scored a lucky hit and damaged the corsair’s maneuver drive.  He was able to pull away before the corsair could repair it.  (Because they have the same G rating, the corsair could never catch up.)  The corsair’s missiles were all shot down as well. The scout pulled this off by rolling an 11, a 12, another 12, and an 11– all in succession!

In the Ogre game I played 5 Heavies, 4 GEVs, and 3 Missile Tanks.  The forward force consisted of 3 Heavies and 4 GEVs.  The Ogre came up the middle and my forces positioned for an attack.  We struck first and took out the Main Battery.  The Ogre rammed three Heavies knocking him down 6 treads.  I started firing everything at the treads except the Missile Tanks which targeted Secondaries.  We knocked him down the Move-2 well before the fold.  The surviving Missile Tanks positioned to 4 hexes away on either side along with the GEVs.  With the Ogre moving at speed 2 the infantry could position for maximum effectiveness.  The Ogre slowed down to take care of the infantry problem, but repeatedly made terrible die rolls in attacking them.  The Ogre continued to charge up the middle.  Even with average rolls the Ogre was soon down to M-1 and finally to M-0.  Even with a missile he didn’t come close enough to the CP to threaten it.  I retained 2 GEVs and 2 Missile Tanks at the end– until he shot his last missile to take out one of my tanks.

I prefer the flexibility of 5 heavy tanks over a static howitzer defense.  The heavies serve as bait to lure the Ogre down the middle– they attract the ire of the Ogre away from the weaker units in the early stages of the game.  The more the Ogre rams, the sooner he’s down to Move-2– which gives us a lot more time and increases the power of the weaker units.  If he doesn’t ram, the Ogre gets shot at by the Heavies.

I’m not sure how this approach fares against the Mark-V.  This force works together well, but with more units on the board they may have trouble getting into position.  In any case, an Ogre that’s been kicked down to M-2 can have 3 secondaries or 100 and it still not do much good– except to fry infantry.

I purchased the Traveller Classic Games book this year and I’ve finally started getting some games out of it.  I’ve started off with Mayday, a classic “Series 120″ game from GDW that came out in the late 70’s.  It’s a realistic tactical high-G space game with rules that reflect actual physics.  It’s also the first game in the Traveller board game series and expands on the space combat rules from the first three classic “Little Black Books.”

In order to celebrate National Games week, I lassoed an acquaintance and forced him to play a few turns with me.  We had just 30 minutes to play, so it was just a quick run through of the rules followed by a single battle pass.

Mayday is counter intuitive in a couple of ways….  Ships just don’t go where you want them to as fast as you’d like them to.  And if you are going fast, you’ll move right along even after you don’t want to anymore.  Also, because standard homing missiles move towards the enemy’s present position counter instead of the future position counter, it takes longer for them to contact than you expect.

My friend (who’s never played tabletop war games) said Mayday was like a computer program– without the computer.  He was intrigued by the way the design was all out in the open compared to how computers just hide how everything works.  He insisted that we get together again next week and have a real battle now that we know the rules.

The Classic Games are available here:

http://www.warehouse23.com/item.cgi?FFE005

http://www.farfuture.net/ffe/n9000.html