Quirkworthy

Mars Attacks can be played in a variety of ways. When you start out you’ve got a single mat and a box full of models to fight with. To get you straight into the action the box also includes a number of scenarios (we’re thinking about 8-10 at the moment). These tell you what you need to set up the board, which models to fight with, and what they need to do to win.

The scenarios are designed to do four things:

1. Get you playing quickly.
2. Teach you how the game works.
3. Show you what each of the types of Soldier and Hero do.
4. Tell the story of Greenville.

As a scenario driven game, the forces are fixed and the board is planned out for you. This allows the scenarios to be carefully balanced, which in turn gives you more replayability. This is the approach I used in Dwarf King’s Hold and Project Pandora. However, this is only the start for Mars Attacks.

As the range expands, new models will have new scenarios written for them that spotlight their specific talents. This means that you can explore the whole of the story of the Martian invasion of Greenville yourself, on the tabletop. Of course, we’re still talking about single mat games here. This may be all you’re interested in, and many people enjoy this story and this wide choice of different ways of playing the game (because that’s essentially what each scenario is – a different way to play the game). You never need to go further than this to have many hours of fun games, but we know that some of you want to. Never mind this skirmish, you want WAR!

Another way to play Mars Attacks is to pick your own armies. This style of game will have its own supplement (possibly called Escalation, though I’m not sure we’ve entirely settled on the name). Whatever it’s called, it will have a full points system for all the models in the range. You may want to play the scenarios in the first box or not, but either way this expansion will allow you to pick a force to an agreed points value, comprised of whatever you think is coolest from the range. Lots of big robots? Sure. Squadrons of flying saucers blackening the sky? Absolutely. Companies of gallant GIs defending the land of the free from alien invasion? You bet.

And what are you picking these armies for? My current plan is to have just two scenarios in this book, and they’re basically the same. The difference is that one is designed for single mat games and the other for four mat battles.

In this context, what I mean by “scenario” is a set of rules for how you set up the scenery, where you deploy your troops and how you win a game. Any story will be up to you to invent.

These scenarios will be straightforward fights with a random twist to keep things interesting and varied from battle to battle. I envisage this taking the form of a fixed set of VPs for kills and then a small table with a sub mission to get more VPs for fulfilling a specific task. This variation in secondary objectives, plus different forces and table layout will mean that every game will be different.

This is your opportunity to get your whole model collection on the tabletop and fight out the really big battles. This is where Mars Attacks moves from being a small and relatively intimate skirmish to being a full blown battle; it pulls back from a close up on the Heroes and you can see an endless vista of smouldering ruins as Greenville burns.

As the man said: prepare your tabletop for invasion!

PS: One final thing for this book of Big Battles is an optional rule about destructible buildings. I really dislike optional rules (why is another rant, another day), but in this case it has to be so because you may not have enough ruins to replace whole bits of wall with and it’s potentially a bit fiddly swapping whole buildings for trashed ones every time a giant robot falls on a house, or a saucer crashes through the church. Blowing up Martian stuff is winning Greenville back for humanity, but it’s making an awful mess.

Basically what I wanted to do is just let you know what blowing stuff up really should be in the big battles version, so it will be 😉

Had another chat about Mars Attacks last night and thanks to the miracles of modern technology it is available on YouTube for your amusement. It’s a bit back and forth because it’s translated into Spanish. Still, it’s not long overall and hopefully there’ll be something of interest there 🙂

There’s a difference between heroes and leaders. At least, there is some of the time. A few individuals can do both, but many of the heroic survivors of Greenville’s largely disintegrated population aren’t cut out to lead troops in battle. They have other qualities that come into their own under different circumstances and will leave the leading to the army guys.

For the moment though, I just thought I’d mention the military leaders and their signature trick, which is to activate several of their men at once. This allows the leader to make coordinated attacks (or “advances to the rear”) at critical moments in order to overwhelm and surprise the opposition. Normally the turn sequence limits a player to moving two models at a time, but this allows a leader to move himself and then up to four more nearby soldiers. With this ability the military heroes work very nicely with hordes of soldiers around them, which makes sense visually too.

Sergeant level characters now have the ability to do this same trick, but only once per game (rather than with “Hero Points”). This makes waiting for the right moment even more important for them, though it does take a bit of the pressure off your heroes and means that the influence can be spread more widely. The range on this effect is quite short and having several models that can do this allows you to keep your opponent guessing about where the axe might fall.

Of course, on a multi-mat battle this is even more useful. With more troops you’ll want ways to move them around more quickly, and this is just the ticket.

Nothing says “you’ve been invaded” quite as well as several huge robots crunching down Greenville’s Main Street, disintegrating everyone they can see. I’d really like to be able to get that image onto the gaming table in Mars Attacks, though the reality is that a single mat just isn’t big enough to contain lots of these monsters – they’re just too big!

So, as well as the single mat scenarios with the big guys in, we’ve been playing with the idea of a larger game, fought across several of the gaming mats. The nice thing is that the rules are so simple that this remains a fast and furious scrap, with the heroes standing out as larger than life even among the robots, saucers and armoured trucks.

The rules need a couple of logistical changes for dealing with larger areas and a few more tweaks if you’re playing with more than two players (another fun option). In the main though, they don’t change that much – what does change is the sweep of the battlefield (they look really impressive with waves of Martians, robots and saucers on) and the game play. With more on the table you can be even more cavalier with the lives of your Martian grunts.

Forward to victory!

I promised I’d get back to heroes eventually, and here I am. As I mentioned in some of the comments, I’ve had a rethink and come up with an improvement on my original idea for the hero rules. It’s still nice and simple, but now integrates the different elements I wanted to include much better and gives the player an interesting headache to think about to boot.

I’m afraid you’ll have to supply your own aspirin.

As with many of the rules I like, the actual rule itself is so simple that it doesn’t look like much on a page. The real fun comes in trying it out in a game.

So what’s the rule? Well it’s a variation of something you may have seen before.

Each hero can do all the things that a soldier can do in their turn. In addition, each hero has two more stats that allow them to do other things too.

Firstly, they have a number of Hero Points. I may think of a better term, but for the moment that’ll do. This ranges from about 2-5 depending on the hero.

Secondly, they have Smarts. Basically this is the special thing that hero does: their signature trick, if you will. For some it might be hotwiring Martian tech, for others it could be inspiring nearby soldiers to action, the ability to use stealth, oratory, disguise or whatever.

During a turn a hero can spend their Hero Points on none, some or all of 3 different things:

1. They can do a limited additional action (move 1 square or take a shot).
2. They can use their Smarts.
3. They can ignore the results of one attack (a get out of death free card). This usually happens in the opposing player’s turn.

Each use of each choice costs one Hero Points.

However, this pool of Hero Points is finite. If it tops up at all it only does so very slowly. In essence, you have to decide between doing funky stuff or saving the points to protect yourself and the balance you choose will make a big difference to your tactics and the outcome of the game. This gives you the effect of heroes being able to do cool stuff, dodge bullets and generally outlive the ordinary soldier, but at the same time this luck cannot last indefinitely. The fact that it doesn’t last also adds a time-running-out element, and time pressure is often exciting in a game.

It’s a bit like Fate, Luck or similar ideas that have been used in many games before. Few (no?) rules are ever entirely new and it’s just the twist and the combination that makes different games different. I’ve not seen this family of rules with quite this combination of uses before, but it’s generally a solid and very workable rule so I’m sure it’ll work fine. I especially like the fact that it rolls the increased survivability of a hero in with their powers, thus limiting both. I also like the fact that it gives a very simple framework within which to define any number of heroes with almost any type of ability. By the time you’ve read this far you should be able to read the stat line of every hero that ever turns up in the game.

Now I’ve checked with the Mantic guys that I can change the few bits I needed to to make this work, I’m playtesting this for the next few days and will then put up some individual hero stats for you to try as well. Sounds like we’ll need a new scenario too. Shame 😉