Rindis.com

In Y149, the Tholian Harassment Squadron entered the Tholian Holdfast to steal web technology. Having captured the PC Solitude, the Klingon task force turned back to the border, but was herded into a Tholian trap.

Patch, Mark and I played this scenario from CL8 Saturday. As with many of the larger pre-published scenarios, it didn’t stick with the script. The general idea is that the Klingon force has to thread its way through asteroids and webs, protecting its prize, or perhaps grabbing a different one (the ship isn’t important, just the technology on it). Meanwhile, the Tholians get reinforcements, and if the Klingons hang around too long they just might get a force that can deal with the Klingons on something approaching even terms.

The problem with this is that the printed asteroid field map, is more of an asteroid belt, with a nice maze running down the middle, but clear areas on each side. It was too possible to get to one of those areas and run through the empty area. Me and Mark actually partially stuck to the script and stayed near the middle for a while.

The second problem was that it was too easy for the Tholians to snipe at the captured ship, and destroyed it after about three volleys. I kind of wonder if the idea is for all the asteroids (and the firing penalties they cause) to protect the captured ship, but it certainly didn’t work that way for us in practice. If we’d been thinking, we should have had the scout protect it with loaned ECM.

At any rate, it was destroyed near the beginning of turn 2, and we didn’t have any good ways to chase down one of the other web-equipped ships. Patch decided that was good enough and disengaged everyone near the beginning of turn 3. That ended the scenario, and keeps the Klingons from just siting on an entry point for reinforcements waiting for someone unlucky to come by to get captured and towed off the board.

The scenario counts as a solid draw, as the Klingons have to get an intact web generator off map to win, and the Tholians have to prevent that and destroy a Klingon ship to win. Historically, it was also a draw, but a lot bloodier on both sides. The most successful part of the exercise was probably setting up a laptop to run a spreadsheet on web strengths (which has me wondering how we can set up everyone with Excel for EA)….

Since we did manage to end a bit early, I showed the both of them Game Kastle, a game store that I had found a while ago. Mark ended up buying Commands & Colors: Ancients, which he’ll have to tell us about later.

It looks like the next SFB session will be Selected Attack from Module C1 in Y152, and the next gaming session will be us trying out Onward Christian Soldiers (though we are still looking for more for Soldier Kings).