Starfall: First Game Overview

Last night we tried out our first game of Starfall 'The Sci-fi Multiverse Tabletop Skirmish Game' (www.starfalltt.com) written by Elijah Kellogg.  I discovered this game system via the Lead Adventure forum and what initially drew me to it was not only the fact it's free to download but, much like Dragon Rampant is to Fantasy, you can use any sci-fi force at your disposal and for me this was enough to download the rules and give them a read.  I was happy to find that the rules were simple and intuitive yet the options for building a force for the tabletop were very diverse.  Want to play Aliens vs Predators vs Terminators?  No problem.  How about Star Wars?  Yup they've got you covered (and I have now picked up some Imperial Assault minis just for this purpose).  How about Dune?  Absolutely (and I'm already being pestered into getting my Dune miniatures painted up to game with as we'll all massive Dune fans).  So a couple of weeks ago I handed out the rules and we were ready to go yesterday.

For our first game we opted to just play a 60uc (universal credits) game rather than the standard 120uc and also drop the play area down to 2x2 rather than the 3x3, the main idea here was to get to grips with the rules and once we are happy them we can scale the game up to normal.  With this in mind we also opted to play a straight kill game rather than any specific scenario.

The battlezone

Neither of us knew what force the other was going to bring, I was using my recently (and not so recently) painted Vanguard from Sedition Wars and was facing off against the U.N.A. from AT-43, which meant we were both playing Legion of Mankind however due to how we had equipped our forces they were quite different.

The Vanguard

U.N.A.

Below I've are some of the key moments from the game.

 The Vanguard deployment

U.N.A. deployment

The U.N.A. pulled the first activation of the game and so a soldier spooled up his gun only for this to happen, needless to say this was ineffective.  The second shot however managed to inflict some damage on Akosha.

Next up was Akosha who was in prime position to fire her scoped rifle but only achieved a decent amount of damage rather than the killer shot I was hoping for, still she had here special action to go (being a Corporal with an initiative of 4).  My hopes of using this were dashed however when the U.N.A. pulled two dice in a row and managed to finish her off.  Not the best of starts but it did take 3 activation's to kill her.

To avenge Akosha my Heavy Repeater advanced up to to some cover and blasted the three soldiers.

The Cover Fire rule for the Heavy Repeater was great here and thanks to their placement two were killed with a third taking a light injury.

As the game heats up the troops advance forward to gain better positions though the U.N.A. soldier on the building would be pivotal, half range and higher ground meant he savaged my two troops on the ground with Cover Fire.

Meanwhile we had an Alpha face off, Kara managed to weather the Ambush fire from the U.N.A. Sgt and return fire with her Plasma Shotgun, it proved rather nasty at that range reducing the Sgt to 3 wounds.

Then in the special actions round the Sgt couldn't go first as he should have done due to being Walking Wounded so Kara charged in and finished him off with her Power Sabre.

This left one wounded U.N.A. soldier on the field so I had my remaining soldier gun him down thanks to a really good roll and the higher ground advantage.  With this the Vanguard claimed victory!

The game took around two hours to play however we do play at a rather leisurely pace with plenty of chitchat and we were referring to the rules more than is normal just to make sure we weren't missing anything along the way.  As I previously said we kept this pretty simple for a first outing (for instance we weren't using any psychic/force/magic powers) but even so it was very enjoyable, play was fluid and it didn't tax our brains too much (which is a bugbear of ours with rule sets, especially after long days at work).  We're certainly looking forward to our next game, which will be in a few weeks, and I think we'll be keeping the same factions though I'll be changing up my force somewhat due to having painted Barker Zosa by then and I'm eager to see what profile I can make for him.