First Look at A Wing And A Prayer (Lock and Load Games)

“OK, fellas, I’m Luigi, and I’m hear to give you a rousing welcome as we get ready to take off and go bomb the Krauts, so listen up, because Uncle Sam put a lot of dough into training you apes, and if you want to ever want to see Tonawanda again, you better fly a tight formation and stay alert.  It’s a good game, and the box is fun to sit in. OK, let’s go."

Thanks, Luigi, I’ll take it from here.   Readers of this blog will know that I have a fondness for the air war over Germany in World War Two, so A Wing and A Prayer: Bombing The Reich by Lock and Load Games isa  2016 release.   It’s a solitaire game, though it can be played with a second player as the German defenders, and is simple enough to play.    The US/solo player is given a squadron B17 bombers, and has to make it through a series of missions in campaigns of various lengths.    There is also an option to play a squadron of B24s.

As you can see from the map, movement is point to point, with Occupied Europe divided into boxes containing various targets and flak hazards.   Each campaign has a variety of targets, each represented by one of the cards seen below.   The early war campaign features targets mostly in France and the Low Countries, and the later campaigns get much more hairy.   Each target is rated for its flak defence, difficulty to bomb, and the amount of bomb damage it requires to reduce and/or eliminate.   You get Victory Points by successfully bombing targets and shooting down enemy fighters while avoiding bomber losses.

Once you get your target, then it’s time to get after it.   For the very first mission of the short 1942 campaign, I drew Lille as a target, which seemed quite easy, only three squares away from England.   I could employ all twelve of my B17Fs, and laid them out in the standard box formation of Lead, High, Low and Tail elements.  Unfortunately, I rolled badly for cloud cover, so my bomb aimers would have to squint through the clouds to see the target.  Luckily for me, I rolled well for escorts.  As you can see at the bottom of the formation card below, I have an escort of 6 P47 Thunderbolts, which have the range to accompany me all the way to the target.  

 

One of the features which gives the game its quality is varying bomber crew quality.   You start off by getting one crack crew, two good crews, and nine green crews, all rated for flying, air combat, and bomb accuracy.   I employed my crack crew, “Hells Angels”, to fly the lead plane in the formation.  If they make it to the target, the formation benefits from their accuracy bonus when bombing.

Once your squadron is in the air, there is an events table to check, possibly leading to enemy fighters, a mechanical malfunction in one of your bombers, or something positive such as a visit from Lady Luck.  The chances of an event increase the further out you are from your home base in England.  In my case, my lead bomber had to check for a mechanical problem just before the bombing run at Lille, but the crew of Hell’s Angels were fortunate.   Once over the target, there was flak to check for, using a combat results table which distributes the attack factors (in this case the flak) over the number of bombers.   Since my squadron was at its full strength of 12, the distribution was very favourable, so that each bomber had to roll “12” on two D6 for something bad to happen.   Everyone got through the flak in and out with no damage to any aircraft.

A similar process happens for the bombing.  Each plane has a bombing, which is multiplied on the same Combat Results Table with possible column shifts for the difficulty of the target, skill of the lead crew, etc.   With the bad clouds over Lille, I got nine chances to roll a 6 on 1D6, with each hit counting for so many damage factors against the target.   I only got 1 hit, which was not nearly enough to significantly damage the target.   Lille will have to wait for another day.

Once your squadron gets home, you can automatically land them, or using an optional rule, check to see who makes it carefully.  Damaged planes, and/or planes with green crews, have a worse chance of landing.  Using the advanced rule, one of my B17s suffered light damage on landing, and had to be placed in the Not Ready box.   For the squadron’s next mission, I will have to check to see of the plane can be repaired in time to go again.    Fewer bombers will increase the risk to the remainder if its not read

 

If there is a flaw with A Wing and A Prayer, I suppose it is repeated die rolling for all these steps.   To complete the raid on Lille, with flak going in and out, and the bombing, I had to roll a total of 1D6 X 57 which, along with checking multiple charts over three separate sheets, seems like a lot of work.   Also, the game is abstract enough that there doesn’t feel like there is much emotional investment in the fate of individual crews.   Perhaps that will change as I run multiple missions, but for now these boys seem rather expendable.   Perhaps that was how the bombers’ commanders really viewed them.

So, an agreeable enough game, which took me about an hour to play.     Hopefully we will revisit Generic Squadron soon for its next mission.

Blessings to your die rolls!

MP+

 

Bombers and Builders: Two Game Reviews

Madame Padre and I are on holiday, enjoying the train, the famed “Canadian”, as we roll across northern Saskatchewan towards Alberta, Jasper and the Rockies on our way to Vancouver, where Madame has a bucket list of gardens, parks and other beauty spots to enjoy.   We’re told we won’t see the mountains until early evening, so lots of time to write up some thoughts on a game I’ve been playing for a few weeks now.

Target for Today (TfT) is published by Legion Wargames, a solo game with a tactical focus as you fly a B17 Flying Fortress or B24 Liberator in a campaign of daylight bombing missions over Europe.   The game thus has an ancestry that includes Avalon Hill’s B17: Queen of the Skies.  Solitaire games (GMT’s submarine games like The Hunters are other recent examples of the genre) have good and bad points.  On the positive side, you don’t need an opponent, which is how I do most of my gaming these days.  On the negative side, you are playing against the game, which really means working through a series of charts and tables, rolling lots of dice, and hoping for the best, which can get rather repetitious after a while.

TfT is a very granular game, with charts and stats for early and late models of B17s and B24s as well as the short lived bomber escort version of the B17.  The game features each individual crewman and crew position, and the gun positions that most of the crew members man.  Once your crew is aboard, your mission is determined by a random die roll featuring a list of targets appropriate to the year and month.  Each target, depending on its distance, has a series of zones that most be transited on the route to the target and the route back home.  Zones are rated for being over water or land (which can effect your survival chances depending on whether you ditch or bail out) and the chance of fighter interception by the Luftwaffe.  Depending on the distance to the target, you may have a lot of zones to navigate, which determines the time necessary to play.

A typical zone transit works as follows.  For each zone you first check the weather, which can vary from clear to 100% cloud cover.  Heavy cloud cover can make it harder for the Luftwaffe to find you, but if the target is cloud covered, it’s obviously hard to hit.  Then you roll for the chance (usually 1-3% for B17s, 1-5% for Liberators) of some sort of mechanical failure.  Then you check for contrails, which if formed make it easier for fighters to intercept your bomb group.  The you check the chance of interception, and if unlucky the intensity of the opposition, the number and type of German fighters less whatever your own fighter escort can do) and then the positions of the enemy fighters.

Fighter combat is played out on this battle board.  Depending on which of your gunners have good arcs of fire, you allocate your guns and the type of fire (spray fire is good for forcing fighters to break off, but uses up your ammo faster).  Once your defensive fire is determined, any German aircraft which are not shot down or aborted can make their attacks.  If successful, damage is checked on a series of tables depending on the angle of attack and the parts of the plane likely to be hit from that angle.  

Here is where the game breaks down a little, because by the time you have reached this point, you are moving between three printed booklets, one of rules and two of tables, including one booklet just for hit and damage tables.   Since a zone may have up to three waves of fighter interceptions, each of  which can have several rounds of combat, it can take a long while, especially as the level of damage is quite granular.   While there are several results that can end the game outright (for example, a flak shell exploding in the bombs in the bomb bay), most of the results are non-fatal but have a cumulative effect.

As an example, I took an early model B24 Liberator on a raid in early 1943.  The target determined was an airfield in Cottbus, which is nine zones from the airfield, so a lot of die rolling there and back.  By the time Lucky Lady (as I called her) reached home, she was badly shot up.  One waist gunner was killed, and the other was seriously wounded.  The bombardier was manning a waist .50 cal because the nose gun was knocked out.  Each wing root had taken two out of four hit points (four and the wing falls off, which is bad).  The radio was destroyed, making an SOS rescue call impossible in the event of a ditching. The intercom system was shot out, giving a negative modifier to all defensive fires.   One of the aerlions was shot up, increasing the chances of a crash on landing.  One of the four engines was damaged and racing, but still working.  Both the ball and the top turrets had one of their two .50 calls inoperative.  The navigator’s workspace had been wrecked, meaning that Lucky Lady would have a harder chance getting home if she had fallen out of formation.  Nevertheless, she persisted and made it to Cottbus, dropped her bombs, and made it home, successfully landing on a very tense percentage dice roll.  The wounded waist gunner would survive, but would go home on a hospital ship for the duration.  Lucky Lady was repairable, and the surviving crew could go on to their next mission, with two new waist gunners.  Crewmen who had recorded 5 kills (the top turret gunner) would qualify for an ace positive modifier on defensive fire in future missions.

In return, I calculated that the crew of Lucky Lady had accounted for at least a dozen fighters destroyed, and that many more damaged.  That result seems excessively high to me, but that is only a gut reaction.  I suppose the downside of this sort of game, like a Hollywood film, is that you have to have the perception of risk but the emphasis on the agency of the heroes, otherwise it would be a dull game.

As an extra layer of chrome, there is a sub-game where you can follow the fortunes of the bomb group that your plane is part of.  For each round of fighters or flak the player consults a table to see if another plane in the group is at risk, with the possibility of damage (1-6 points out of 6) or even the plane being destroyed.  This sub game can also interact with random events from the main game, which can result in mid-air collisions among the bomb group or individual cells of planes being temporarily disrupted and more vulnerable to attack.  In Lucky Lady’s first mission, the entire bomb group returned safely, though eight planes had sustained damage, of which three had lost four of six damage points).

 

TfT is a lot of great ideas crammed into one game.  Some of the systems may need to be discarded or streamlined at the player’s discretion for a faster game.  For example, you may not care that Navigator Bloggin’s left forearm is grazed according to the wounds tables.  It may just suffice that he is lightly wounded.  Likewise, while it may be satisfying after shooting down a FW 190 to check the enemy plane destroyed table to see how it was destroyed, that is the chromiest of chrome and wholly unnecessary.   While there are a host of player logs and damage/ammo records that can be photocopied and used during play, I have found that a running log on a scratchpad saves the aggravation of sorting through multiple log sheets in play. Even cutting a few corners, a long mission can take a long time to play.  It easily took 3 hours of real time to complete the epic journey of Lady Luck and that time cost could be a problem for those looking for a quick gaming experience

For fans of the bombing campaigns over the Reich, TfT may well provide an immersive experience.  However, for a game where the question of interest is, can I survive 25 missions, the player may lose interest before learning the answer to that question.

As a quick bonus review, I had a chance to play a game called Mare Nostrum - Empires at the club last week before going on holiday.  It’s an expansion/reboot of the 2003 Eurogames title, this time published by Academy Games - the kind of game where you expand, build, and maybe fight other players on your quest for glory.  It is very loosely historical, since the empires in play include Rome, Persia, and Atlantis.  Different races have different advantages.  Egypt, being most civilized, can build stuff more easily, whereas Rome is best at fighting, and so on.    The owner of the game picked up this deluxe, extra-large rubberized map, which really shows it to advantage.

 

Mare Nostrum allows sudden death victory in several ways, such as being the lead on all three of these tracks (trade, civilization, and military prowess) at any time in the game.  The cards above the tracks are various superheroes (such as Penthilsea, the Queen of the Amazons) who can be purchased in lieu of buying temples, cities, troops, ships or other useful things). Again, get enough of these superheroes and you win the game automatically.  

I

n the one game I played, I was slowly chugging along, trying to expand my little Roman empire.  I had expanded to Sicily, hoped to colonize the legendary city of Syracuse and get a hidden legendary city goody that might help me, while raising some troops to deter my neighbours, who were also slowly building stuff.  The guy playing Carthage had opted to recruit a stable of heroes, but he was two away from winning the game that way, and those last two heroes were pretty expensive, so I wasn’t worried.  Then, the Egypt player, who also owned the game, revealed that he had raised 10 gold pieces that we were totally not tracking, enough for him to buy the Great Pyramids, which was, quelle suprise, another Sudden Death way to win the game.  

Because I had been so invested in the idea of slowly building up Rome the traditional, incremental way, and maybe fighting some battles along the way, I was oblivious to the game as game, and to the various routes to victory that it offered.   I have trouble remembering that games of this sort are, well, gamey, and need to be approached as such.  Instead, I was fixated on the idea that I was playing a more complex, traditional sort of expansion game.   As the victor pointed out, one of the advantages of Mare Nostrum is that it can be played to a resolution in under two hours, which for a club game on a weeknight is a highly desirable outcome.  Nevertheless, I found myself dissatisfied.  Despite the myriad numbers of chrome and levels of complexity in a game like TfT, it offered a substantial experience, whereas  Mare Nostrum was like a delicious creamy pastry, lovely to look at but easily disposed of in a few bites and leaving me wanting more.

If you are on Twitter, I invite you to follow my account, @madpadre1, because I have live tweeted several B17 missions, putting my Twitter friends into the various crew positions for a mission somewhat abbreviated for playability.  It has proven to be a lot of fun, as over a couple of hours you get the chance to risk flak and fighters, with lots of silly banter and some .GIFs along the way.   I try to give folks a few days notice to reserve their spot in the crew, so grab your sheepskin bomber jacket and come along for the fun but be warned, on our second mission we lost our navigator, who lost an arm to a flak splinter, and is now going home.  Maybe you can replace him?

Blessings to your die rolls and bombs away!

MP+

Die Autos

I wanted to title this post Das Auto and see how many visitors I got thinking that it was about Volkswagens, but I think Die Autos is grammatically correct, since there was more than one.

Got to the wargames club last night hoping for a good scrap.   It was racing cars instead.   Len had ordered a German game, Das Motorosportspiel, via ebay and as far as I could tell he got a map in a tube and six quite nice little racing cars.  The rules were in German and there was a translation which left us scratching our heads a bit.


but as far as we could tell, each player gets to role three dice.  Two of the dice are normal d6 and 1 is a D6 that only goes from 1 to 3.   Players can decide how many dice they will roll ahead of time, and they can adjust each die by flipping it over.   You can’t go through a turn with a die whose number is higher than the number printed on the map beside each turn, or bad things happen.

We played the game collectively, working together to decide the best use of the dice.  However, the game comes with a sand timer that gives each player only 30 seconds to adjust their dice and plot their move before making it.  That would be fun, I suppose.  We got through the game without making zoom zoom noises.
I know there are other car boardgames out there, such as GMT’s Thunder Alley.   I am a little meh about race cars, and get enough driving on my commute to work each day, but es war amusing, ich dense.  If it was more of a Europgame, each driver would have had to collect sets of tires, motor oils and carparts and sponsorships in order to develop their garages. It would also have been better if the cars each mounted a machine gun.
Blessings to your driving!
MP+

The Grizzled: An Eerie Card Game About World War One

The Chaplain’s Retreat that I mentioned in my last post is over, and while there the Padre Geek Contingent played a lot of games.   I got introduced to an addictive boardgame called Lords of Vegas, a kind of Monopoly meets craps game where cuthroat intrigue and strategy can stand or fall on the roll of a dice.  There was a game about racing camels that involved shaking bespoke dice out of a cardboard pyramid.  That was fun.   

However, the game that hooked us all was a small card game called The Grizzled, a cooperative card game about soldiers trying only to survive in the trenches.

 

 

A game for 2-6 players, The Grizzled (an English translation of the word poilu, the French slang equivalent of Tommy Atkins or doughboy), features poignant artwork and some simple mechanics to create a quickly building sense of doom and menace.   The object is for players to survive a series of missions and come through the war unscathed, so they can all go back to their village where they were childhood friends.   As the missions surmount, players’ characters accumulate psychic wounds, called Hard Knock cards, that make it harder to survive.   Between missions, players can try to benefit one another through kind acts in a phase called the Recovery Phase, to help heal some of these wounds.

It’s a hard game to win.  We played it three times straight, and we lost each time, but there were many theories as to how we could have done better.

There’s a review of The Grizzled here.  One sad thing mentioned in the review is that the lovely art for the game was done by Tignous, aka Bernard Verlhac, a French cartoonist who was killed in the Charlie Hebdou attacks in 2015.  

The Grizzled isn’t a wargame, per se, but it is a very effective way to think about war and to empathize with those who have fought wars, which is one reason why many of us play these games.  Highly recommended.

Blessings,

MP+

Tuesday Night Boardgame: Berlin '85 Update, CCN Napoleonics Wertingen, And A New ACW Game

Hello all!

It’s Tuesday and that means, in my fitful, irregular sort of way, a board game update.   First, an update on the SPI Berlin ’85 game I mentioned here a month ago.  Sorry to those who were awaiting more updates.  That game ended on Day 3 of World War Three as a NATO marginal victory.   Most of the US and British units had been eliminated and the survivors, along with a handful of remaining WG police and militia, were pushed back to the city centre.  The British suffered badly when the American flank collapsed and the East German division got behind them, cutting off their retreat routes.  The lavish amounts of Soviet artillery in the south make it very hard the for Yanks to hold their ground, but they did it long enough for a tiny US battery to shell the key rail line at the south end of the map.  As long as that unit is protected by NATO Zones of Control, it can rack up an impressive score of victory points by interdicting the Soviet supply line to the main front, so it did its job beautifully until finally hunted down and eliminated.  The Soviets never committed their Airborne division, since that comes with a steep cost in VPs.   Berlin ’85 has some interesting optional rules, including the use of Soviet chemical weapons, which would make it much harder for NATO.  The design notes admit that this is a pretty dire advantage for the Soviets, but speculates that the USSR would likely not use chemical weapons in an urban context, given the terrible toll on civilians and resulting propaganda costs.  Fortunately this was never tested.  I’ll put Berlin 85 back on the shelf,as it was one of the better games to appear in Strategy and Tactics in the late 1970s (and there were some bad ones - remember Armada?), and it would be fun to use the unknown strength counter sides of the units in a two player game.

 Last week I had Command and Colors Napoleonics set up on the games table.  I chose the first official scenario from the Austrian Army expansion,  Wertingen.  This battle (8 Oct 1805) came in the opening phase of the Ulm campaign, and saw Murat’s cavalry and Oudinot’s grenadiers crush an isolated Austrian force.  I played it solo and the French won it easily, 5-2.   

Starting positions (sorry for those of you bored by photos of blocks.  Not very sexy, I know).  The Austrians outnumber the French, but the French have 2.5 times as many cavalry units, and a big chunk of the Austrian army is sitting on the right wing, whereas the French are massed against the weaker Austrian left.  

While the Austrians did well early, knocking off a heavy French cavalry unit and killing its leader (sorry, Murat fans), the  French cavalry ground away at the Austrian left, while a timely Flank March card allowed the French to get the grenadiers forward early on.   While bloody for both sides, the end was not long in doubt.  Here’s the view at the end.  The Austrian Left has been entirely eliminated.

I want to go through the Austrian scenarios and see which ones lend themselves to interesting miniatures games.   I have enough 6mm figures to do Wertingen, but I’m not convinced it would be an interesting battle.   The consensus on CCNaps.net is that this is almost an impossible scenario for the Austrians to win.

I can say though that the Austrian army in CCNaps is interesting.  The big 5 block Austrian line infantry units can put out some fearsome firepower, and the Battalion Mass rule allows Austrian line to go into Square without giving up a card, which seems very handy.   I’m looking forward to dipping into more of the scenarios in this Expansion.  Speaking of CCN Expansions, is anyone else excited about #5, Generals, Marshals and Tactics?  

In a future Tuesday Boardgame, I’ll talk about a game that just arrived in the mail, Huzzah!: Grand Tactical Battles of the American Civil War, from One Small Step.

 The designer, Richard A. Dengel, has done at least one other ACW game, Rebel Yell, which I don’t know.  However, the fact that the four battles depicted in this game (Belmot, Newbern, Iuka and Stephenson’s Depot) are fairly obscure, and the small tactical focus of this game, promised to scratch a number of my itches.  There’s a review by Paul Comben here, and a spirited response from Dengel.

Here some quick impressions from my unboxing.  My heart sank as I picked up the shrink wrapped box and heard individual pieces of cardboard rattling around inside.   That didn’t inspire confidence.   Here’s the reason why I was hearing that sound.  Almost half of the counters had detached from the two counter sheets and were rattling around.  Some had infiltrated the folded maps, others had made their way into the rules and scenario booklets.  I tried to be careful not to lose any, but I think sorting the counters out is going to be a bit of a chore.

Speaking of counters, it would have been nice of the publisher, OSS, to have at least included a handful of ziplock plastic bags to store the counters once punched and sorted.  GMT does that, and while it’s a small thing, I think it goes some way to making up for the lost golden days of plastic counter trays that SPI and Avalon Hill once routinely included in their boxed games.

Huzzah! comes with four separate, quite small maps.  Here’s the map for Belmont, which I’m going to try first.  Belmont was US Grant’s first battle, and not his best by a long shot.    The map seems a little dark but it is rich on geographical features and has a pleasing number of charts printed on it, which may make up for the absence of a graphic player aid card (the one reference chart in the box is all text based).

So watch for news of the Battle of Belmont in a future Tuesday Boardgame report.

Before I sign off, I note that today is the anniversary of  the Wilderness, another US Grant battle, and a much bigger one.   I recently read Gordon C. Rhea’s book, The Battle of the Wilderness: May 5-6, 1864.   I know SPI did this battle years ago, perhaps in one of their quad packs, but I’m not aware of anyone who has done a board game treatment since.  It’s a battle that would lend itself well to partial treatment on the tabletop, and I’ve given that some thought, but I’d need a lot of trees.  Lots and lots of trees.  I don’t think one could do the whole battle unless it was in 6mm, as it was a huge, sprawling, confused engagement.  Whatever one thinks of Grant as a commander, and he didn’t exactly shine at the Wilderness, at the end of May 6 he turned his army south, and that was the beginning of the end for Lee and his army.  Not every general would have made that commitment after two days of bruising and mauling battle.  Good fellow, Grant.

Well chaps, it’s past my bedtime, so that’s all for now.  Blessings to your die rolls!

MP+

Tuesday Night Boardgame: Imperial Stars II

When I was a teenager, I was given a game called Imperium (1977) by Game Designer’s Workshop which became a classic in the genre of mighty starships being launched and tearing into each other in mighty fleets to capture planets and gain resources to build yet more warships  to control a vast galaxy- that sort of thing.  I wish I still had that game, it gave me hours of pleasure.   It’s been long OOP, and while I haven’t found another copy, I think I’ve found a game that’s almost as good.  

Imperial Stars II is a clever little game from one of my favourite clever little gaming companies, Victory Point Games.  The designer is Chris Taylor, who has done a whack of SF-themed games.  It’s a game about, well, starships being launched and tearing into each other in mighty fleets to capture planets and gain resources to build yet more warships  to control a vast galaxy

One of the admirable things about this game is that it includes two double-sided maps (11” by 17’) , giving you four possible maps to play on for a variety of gaming experiences.  This map in the photo below is a fairly cluttered one, with asteroids, nebulae, singularities and dust clouds.   Each special terrain hex slows down movement and poses a different headache in combat.  Maps vary in their degree of clutter.

Each game begins with a small fleet in being for either side, shown below in their starting positions on Turn 1.  Additional ships can be purchased from the groups in the boxes at the top and bottom of  the map. Ships are two kinds, escorts and capital ships.  Capital ships can survive one hit, and can be repaired.  Ships can also be turned into colony bases, which gives you a base of territory but reduces the size of your navy, so that’s a fine balance to maintain in the early stages of the game.  The light blue round tiles on the map are planets, which can be claimed by either player and turned into colonies.

The game is driven by these “Op Chits”.  They are turned face down and mixed up, and drawn randomly by players in turn. They determine how many things or Ops a player gets to do in each phase.  Besides the number on the chit, players get an Op for each colony they posses, which is an incentive to get as many colonies as you can early on.  After a “Galactic Cycle” when each player uses their five Ops Chits, the lowest number is taken out of play, which means that each full turn (or Galactic Cycle) is shorter than the last turn.  Essentially this mechanic builds a clock into the game and keeps the game fairly short.

You also have to like a game where all the charts and tables fit on a single half sheet of paper.

Another clever aspect to the game is that the planet hexes are assigned random qualities which basically act as power ups or wild cards.  Some have attributes that can only be used once, like advantages in a space battle, and others have ongoing benefits.  Here two ships from Red Fleet, a light carrier and light cruiser, close in on an unclaimed planet.

Having taken the planetary system, Red spends Op Points to convert the DD ship into a Colony Base, and gets the bonus, “Energy, Add Two Operations” which adds two op points to Red at the start of each subsequent phase for as long as Red controls the planet - one of the nicer benefits of the planet chits.

 

 

The situation at the end of the first of five Galactic Cycles in the game.  Red and Yellow both control five planets besides their home planets.  There have been no battles yet but I expect some will come soon.  Space combat is quite brutal and simple.  Ships fight each other using missiles if they have that capability in the first round of combat.  One hit destroys an escort and damages a capital ship.  Two hits destroy a capital ship.  Damaged capital ships can be repaired using ops points.  After the first round of missile combat, surviving ships fight a round of combat using beams, the number on the bottom left corner of the ship counters in the above photo.  Any ships surviving that round then fight another round of missile combat.  This sequence continues until one side is destroyed or runs.  Destroyed ships can be brought back into play as salvage, but that takes time and Ops Points.  A useful tactic is to build up fleets (up to six ship counters of the same side can stack in a hex) and try to intercept your opponent’s ships during his or her turn.  The forces of the two sides are symmetrical - same types of ships and same weapons capabilities.

Imperial Stars II is a simple and clever game, well suited to solitaire play because of the Ops Chits system.  It could be explained to another person in ten minutes and played to a conclusion in 2-3 hours tops.   At a fairly inexpensive price ($26.99 US) and with its four maps to give high replay ability, I recommend it to SF fans.  It could also be used as a scenario generator for miniature SF gamers who want some context for their space battles.

Blessings to your die rolls!

MP