MINI WARGAMING: Star Mogul Strikes Again!
Hi Guys,
I'm in the middle of a move, which has cramped my gaming style, but nevertheless have gotten a game of Star Mogul in. Last Saturday (4 February 2006), Kurt, Kurt's stepson Stephen, Mark and I met at Great Escape Games and gave a Star Mogul its trial run. I was very glad to take the break from moving. I've already had it with cleaning, packing and schlepping!
Kurt took his all-girl Necromunda gang and Mark played his scrap gang who all have a fetish for German names... something like "Shlieman & Sons" with every other guy named Gunter or some odd name from a television show like the Simpsons. Mark has a weird but delightful sense of humor. Stephen watched and I took ahold of a rule set and did my best to referee the game. One thing we discovered very quickly was that Star Mogul was written with the inspiration of Phil Barker... meaning that the rules are very cluttered and more often than not, difficult to understand... and that was with the errata sheet!
Stephen and I set up an urban sqaure with buildings and rubble strewn acorss the field as well as six salvage caches. Mark and Kurt were playing a salvage mission in which one of them had to either haul away the majority of the salvage (4 of 6 markers) or eliminate their opponent. It wasn't hard to guess which of the two victory conditions that the guys would be choosing... elimination of their opponents of course!
Both Mark and Kurt started out on opposite sides of the city and started out trying to find salvage. Mark's gang quickly hit paydirt while Kurt's gang struggled to dig through the choice piles to find archaotech and other goodies. Star Mogul is a pretty simple system in many ways and reminds me alot of Necromunda. Salvage rolls were made with 2d6 with the players needing to roll under their slavage ability which was modfied by the number and skill of the salvage techs as well as some other factors. It seemed like it was hard to get better than a 6 score, which made Mark's better salvage teams effective at finding treasure about half the time, while Kurt's lesser-skilled scrap techs had lower scores and failed a number of rolls.
Once Mark's gang found treasure, they prepared to drag it back to their drop site when we read the rules on hauling treasure back... Uggh! Four or more gangers are required to drag each pile of treasure at an average rate of two inches a turn! We all agreed that the slow treasure haul rate would make the game tedious so we're going to write some house rules to solve that problem... otherwise the majority of a game would be spent finding and shlepping treasure back and forth. My move between apartments is more exciting than that! Mark wants to have automated haulers so that the gangs can rumble.
Eventually the gangs came into contact and shots were exchanged. Urah!
We quickly discovered that Mark's gangers had the advantage... he specialized his gang into two squads, an infantry combat-specialized squad with a medic and a scrap squad led by a robot with a gatling gun. Both had impressive abilties and yet were effective in combat. Poor Kurt's ganf had a good mix of skills, most of which were useless since pilting or driving skills are only good if you have a vehicle! Kurt also took the grenade skill and I think he probably realized that grenades were pretty lame... only an 8 inch range with a 1 inch radius of explosion. You'd be lucky to hit two opponents let alone a higher number.
Kurt's gang was slaughtered. It wasn't pretty.
Kurt also tried using the infantry cannon, which didn't seem all that impressive. The gatling gun on Mark's robot was far more impressive. The game could use some more weapon variety. I plan to check out the sniper rifle with my gang. Some of the heavy support weapons seems not so useful.
All in all, it was a good session and I'm looking forwaqrd to building my gang / scrap company. And thanks to Dafrca's many generous trades / donations, I have enough 28mm sci-fi figures to do that. My squad is a motely assortment of figures though... GW, Void, Grenadier Colonial Marines, Metal Magic sci-fi and a few figures that I have no idea who manufactured them.
Star Mogul is a good game, but not a great one. It needs to be playtested and have the kinks worked out of it. A good editor could do wonders for the layout of the rules as well... make them far easier to understand. I'm looking forward to starting my own scrap company and playing ina linked campaign. I can't wait to see what Dick comes up with... I can envision him bringing GW Orkz into the fray.
Shalom,
Maksim-Smelchak.
I'm in the middle of a move, which has cramped my gaming style, but nevertheless have gotten a game of Star Mogul in. Last Saturday (4 February 2006), Kurt, Kurt's stepson Stephen, Mark and I met at Great Escape Games and gave a Star Mogul its trial run. I was very glad to take the break from moving. I've already had it with cleaning, packing and schlepping!
Kurt took his all-girl Necromunda gang and Mark played his scrap gang who all have a fetish for German names... something like "Shlieman & Sons" with every other guy named Gunter or some odd name from a television show like the Simpsons. Mark has a weird but delightful sense of humor. Stephen watched and I took ahold of a rule set and did my best to referee the game. One thing we discovered very quickly was that Star Mogul was written with the inspiration of Phil Barker... meaning that the rules are very cluttered and more often than not, difficult to understand... and that was with the errata sheet!
Stephen and I set up an urban sqaure with buildings and rubble strewn acorss the field as well as six salvage caches. Mark and Kurt were playing a salvage mission in which one of them had to either haul away the majority of the salvage (4 of 6 markers) or eliminate their opponent. It wasn't hard to guess which of the two victory conditions that the guys would be choosing... elimination of their opponents of course!
Both Mark and Kurt started out on opposite sides of the city and started out trying to find salvage. Mark's gang quickly hit paydirt while Kurt's gang struggled to dig through the choice piles to find archaotech and other goodies. Star Mogul is a pretty simple system in many ways and reminds me alot of Necromunda. Salvage rolls were made with 2d6 with the players needing to roll under their slavage ability which was modfied by the number and skill of the salvage techs as well as some other factors. It seemed like it was hard to get better than a 6 score, which made Mark's better salvage teams effective at finding treasure about half the time, while Kurt's lesser-skilled scrap techs had lower scores and failed a number of rolls.
Once Mark's gang found treasure, they prepared to drag it back to their drop site when we read the rules on hauling treasure back... Uggh! Four or more gangers are required to drag each pile of treasure at an average rate of two inches a turn! We all agreed that the slow treasure haul rate would make the game tedious so we're going to write some house rules to solve that problem... otherwise the majority of a game would be spent finding and shlepping treasure back and forth. My move between apartments is more exciting than that! Mark wants to have automated haulers so that the gangs can rumble.
Eventually the gangs came into contact and shots were exchanged. Urah!
We quickly discovered that Mark's gangers had the advantage... he specialized his gang into two squads, an infantry combat-specialized squad with a medic and a scrap squad led by a robot with a gatling gun. Both had impressive abilties and yet were effective in combat. Poor Kurt's ganf had a good mix of skills, most of which were useless since pilting or driving skills are only good if you have a vehicle! Kurt also took the grenade skill and I think he probably realized that grenades were pretty lame... only an 8 inch range with a 1 inch radius of explosion. You'd be lucky to hit two opponents let alone a higher number.
Kurt's gang was slaughtered. It wasn't pretty.
Kurt also tried using the infantry cannon, which didn't seem all that impressive. The gatling gun on Mark's robot was far more impressive. The game could use some more weapon variety. I plan to check out the sniper rifle with my gang. Some of the heavy support weapons seems not so useful.
All in all, it was a good session and I'm looking forwaqrd to building my gang / scrap company. And thanks to Dafrca's many generous trades / donations, I have enough 28mm sci-fi figures to do that. My squad is a motely assortment of figures though... GW, Void, Grenadier Colonial Marines, Metal Magic sci-fi and a few figures that I have no idea who manufactured them.
Star Mogul is a good game, but not a great one. It needs to be playtested and have the kinks worked out of it. A good editor could do wonders for the layout of the rules as well... make them far easier to understand. I'm looking forward to starting my own scrap company and playing ina linked campaign. I can't wait to see what Dick comes up with... I can envision him bringing GW Orkz into the fray.
Shalom,
Maksim-Smelchak.
Labels: Necromunda, Session report, Star Mogul
posted by MaksimSmelchak @ 11:30 AM
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