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We were scheduled for a two-team SFB battle on Saturday, but Paul developed car trouble and couldn’t make it. That left us with three people and no plan B. After a fair bit of hunting around we decided to play “The Stasis Box” again, with the third player option.

Mark and I swapped roles, and Patch took the Klingons. I was a little aggressive in the first turn’s surveys, zooming off to the second closest asteroid cluster, and dropping off a shuttle to check the closest. Once again, I rolled poorly and took a fair amount of asteroid damage on the way in. Worse, the asteroid patch I explored turned out to conceal a mine, and I couldn’t come to a stop before moving again and detonating the mine, losing the rear shield and taking a good number of internals.

The next several turns were peaceful as everyone explored, I repaired what I could, and all the explorations turned up just more rocks. Patch eventually found a second mine, but was able to halt and creep out of its detection radius. Possible locations were running out, and it was looking like there weren’t any stasis boxes at all.

And then Mark found one. He was torn between sitting the two turns to collect it, or staying at speed and seeing who else might go for it. He chose the former, and unsurprisingly soon had a Klingon F5 in front of him, with a Fed DD further behind and to the side. The good news for him was that the asteroids were protecting him fairly well, and he only needed to get about 5 hexes to disengage.

And then as the Kzinti was getting battered to pieces, and it was becoming sure that he wouldn’t make it off, one of my shuttles found the second stasis box in the last unexplored cluster. Which meant Patch and I wanted to keep the Kzinti from getting away and beat up the other fellow to keep him from getting a win by grabbing the last one.

If I hadn’t taken that mine early on, I might have had a chance. My pass at the tractored Kzinti became a point blank pass at the Klingon. Sadly, he had phasers and disruptors, while my photons were rearming. Actually, I did have one standard load torpedo, but was too close to use it, and the mine had taken out the batteries, so I couldn’t emergency overload it so it could fire.

And once the pass was done, I had my still-crippled rear shield to the Klingon. I didn’t last much longer.

So… next time we should be doing the 2-on-2 team battle. Barring broken cars.