Mandarin's Manor: B5 A Call to Arms Miniature game review

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June 08, 2005

B5 A Call to Arms Miniature game review

First here are some cool pix of my Babylon 5 minaitures taken by Kim Farrell.

Navel game (regardless of age, be it sail or trireme) is never my thing, (or more specifically, manuevering distinct objects around a 2D surface while trying to destroy other objects is not really my thing). By extension I never really had an affinity for tactical air game or spaceship games as well. All that begin to change after getting into the Babylon 5 TV series (watching the entire 4 seasons worth of DVD in about a month ought to do that to a person). So after Mongoose announced their licensed B5 spaceship game, there's stiring in the group about starting to collect/play these suckers.

There has been a long history of spaceship games based on the B5 property (since the setting is ideal for spaceship battle game: 1) The TV series is packed with "war-like" episodes (none of your wimpy peacenik Star-Trek stuff here, and 2) there are multiple combatants in the show and each have their distainct characteristics. The most famous ruleset is probably the B5 Wars rules from Agents of Gaming. I've never played with these but I hear it is slow and involved, more in the mold of the old Star Fleet Battles.

AoG also came out with a set of quick play rules called Fleet Action. It's suppose to be fast moving and designed for playing with lots of miniatures. It's something that fit's my rules preference but sadly the rules are out of print (plus it's designed to be used with a "smaller" sized miniature played on a hex-grid, much LESS my thing...)

When Mongoose announced their A Call to Arms game (ACTA) they described it as "much faster paced" than the old B5 Wars, yet designed to be played with larger ships (i.e the same sized ship manufactured by AoG). The system is designed to be simple with little bookkeeping.

The rules is alternate IGO-UGO movement (i.e. You move a ship, then I move a ship, continue until all ships have moved), followed by IFIRE-UFIRE combat. At the end there's an end phase where damaged ship can attempt to repair critical damage. That's pretty much it.

Movement is sort of a simplified vector movement. Everyship is rated for speed (i.e. 8" meaning you can move up to 8 inches a turn), and maneuverability (i.e. 2/45, meaning you can make 2 45 degree turns during a turn/bound). A ship must first move stright forward at least 1/2 of their speed before they can make their first turn, and then they must move 2" more before they can make their 2nd turn (if they even have a 2nd turn ability).

One key facet of the rules (and in my mind what made it special) is the "special actions" (SA). Basically each turn a ship can perform a special action that let the ship gain a variety of benefits while incurring some penalty. An SA might let you move further, at the expense of not being able to turn, or an action might let you increase your firepower, but you can not manuever and must precommit to your target during the movement phase, etc. It's a nice and simple rule that adds decision and flavor to your games without adding too much complexity (there are only about 12 different SA to choose from). It's also a feature that can be easily adapted to other space combat games.

Now we get to my least favorite part of the game: Combat. Mongoose have decided that the Games Workshop standard combat (i.e. roll to hit, roll to damage) is the way to go, and then they've added different "traits" to distinguish the different weapons. So you might have a "twin-linked" weapon, which let you reroll any misses on the to hit dieroll, or a Bean weapon, which if you hit, can roll to hit again, etc. All these weapon systems with their distinct characteristics sounds flavorful on paper, but extremely tedious in practice, since once you declare an attack there aren't any more choices to be made, but then there are long and laborious dierolling sequence to resolve said combat.
Here's an example: A centaurii declares an attack with his "Battle laser" against the Minbari ship. The following rolls have to be made:
1) Roll to see if weapon can lock on (Since Minbari have "Stealth" trait the weapons might not be even able to attempt to hit).
2) Assume that it locks on, it then rolls 4D6 and attempt to hit.
3) Any dice that hits can roll again (and again) with a -1 DRM since this is a "beam" weapon.
4) Now that we have a total of X hits, now roll damage for each hit (oh ya, I forgot to mention that a damage roll is rolled with 2D6, so you can't even pick up a bucket of dice to roll at once, but have to roll then one after another, look up on a chart, and then note the result. Possible results ranges from no effect to 1 hit on crew/ship, all the way to critical hit.
5) If it's a critical hit, then roll another 2D6 on the Critical Hit table to find out the result.

Now all that is for ONE weapon system. The Centauri Primus for example has 5 different weapon systems, and if there are enemy in all of the covered arcs, they could all fire that turn. That's a LOT of dice rolling. (When I ran this game for Chris and Tristan, this excessive dierolling is what killed the game for Chris).

Thankfully I am not the only one out there complaining about this. Someone came up with a website that let you click on the firer ship type and click on a target, then resolve all that dice rolling for you. This made the game bearable, and we finished a game in less than an hour. You can find the program here.

The game came with many different scenarios (ranging from standard line them up and have at it to more interesting games like "Flee to the jump gate!" where a smaller force has to escape through a jump gate while a larger enemy force is materializing out of hyperspace attempting to cut it off. This is what we played last night, a fun experience even though we lost...) There are also "historical" scenarios you can play which is straight out of the TV show. A simple (but interesting) campaign system is also included with the rules.

All in all, a nice and fast system if you use the combat program to speed up attack resolution. We had enough fun that my next project is to run a campaign where the Centauri and the Minbari is fighting for the control of a star system. Stay tuned...

Posted by msoong at June 8, 2005 07:53 PM

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