Quirkworthy

For the big battles in Mars Attacks we’ll be using a simple points system, as mentioned earlier. This will give you a chance to tailor your army to suit your style of play. If you want lots of robots, go robot. If unstoppable waves of grunts is the way you invade, then go for it. Fleets of saucers? Knock yourself out.

The following points may change slightly before the final version as we’ve still got more playtesting left to do. However, I don’t anticipate radical changes, just minor tweaks.

So, Humanity’s noble defenders first:

• 9-man US Army squad (includes Sergeant and 2 SAWs): 6
• Missile launcher: 3
  
• Patriot (MG): 3
• Patriot (ray): 5
• 6-man Novas Vira squad: 9
• Heroes: 2-5 each (priced individually)

And the Martian invaders:

• General Tor: 5
• 10-man Martian grunt squad: 10 (includes unit commander and freeze ray)
• 5-man Martian marines squad: 9
• 5-man Stealth Troops squad: 9
• Saucer: 5
• Robot: 10

There will be a system for balancing the odd point or two left at the end if you can’t quite get exactly the right total (starting with extra cards in hand, support cards in play, etc).

I know that you haven’t got all the stats for everything yet. However, these points will help you work out what you want your force to look like and what you need in terms of models.

Big Battle Scenarios

There are two of these: one for a single mat and the other for a four mat game (2×2). Again, this is the initial draft and so it focuses on whether the core of the game works properly at this size rather than fancy frills. There are some refinements to add in, most notably a random roll at the start to see what sub-mission you’re on.

Single mat games are played at 40 points per side, and four mat games at 100 points each.

For the moment we’re using this simple victory condition. Count the number of models in your army at the start of the game. Count each soldier as 1, each hero, saucer or truck as 3 and each robot as 5. Using this same calculation, the first side to reduce their foe to half or less of this total remaining on the battlefield wins the battle.

Building Armies

With the information above, you can see what sort of combinations you can get on the tabletop. On a single mat you could have a couple of saucers flying over a ground wave of two squads backed up by a robot. Or, you could have two robots, four saucers and forget the ground forces! Hmm, maybe that’s a bit excessive. Maybe…

On the bigger board you’ve got room to really indulge your megalomanic fantasies. You can happily have General Tor leading three robots, three saucers and fifty Martian infantry. Now that really does look like an invasion!

On the human side you’ll be wanting a fair amount of infantry and those missiles are great for taking out the big things. At the same time, your heroes are where you have an edge, and even though they’re small they can turn the tide on a flank, which can then domino through the rest of a battle. Trucks can be mobile cover as well as mobile pill boxes, so don’t forget to take a couple. however, if you want elites who have actually been waiting for the martians invasion (and preparing and training and… ) then the Novas Virae are on hand. They’re much pricier than your normal infantry, but they are good.

Both sides have a number of approaches they can adopt, and if you play the same opponents regularly you can have fun trying to second guess what style of army they’ll be fielding this time. You could also play “winner stays on” and not allow the winner of the previous game to change their force. That way you can test out tactics and get to know both how your force works and how your enemy responds.

Now you’ve got the Heroics rules and a couple of Heroes, here’s a sticky situation  for them to try and get out of.

Oh, and here’s another Hero before we start:

Tench-hut!

The Sarge is a veteran of more wars than you can count.

His stats are:

• Shoot: 4+
• Fight: 4+
• Survive: 6+
• Range: 6
• Heroics: 2
• Notes: Brave, Follow Me!

Heroic Ability: Follow Me!

The model is a born leader, or someone with unquestioned authority over the troops.

Complete the model’s activation as normal. Then, if you want to trigger this ability, nominate up to four other unactivated models on the same side no more than 2 squares away. One at a time, these models are now activated. Complete each model’s activation before moving on to the next. As usual, all models are marked as activated once they have completed their actions.

As these additional activations are all triggered by the original model’s ability, they only count as a single model for purposes of working out what that player can do this Turn.

How Are You Feeling?

The latest version of the Brave ability goes like this. Note that this isn’t a Heroic ability so it doesn’t cost anything to use it.

Brave

The model has a strong sense of duty and honour. They feel it is their duty to protect the weaker civilians from danger.

A model with this ability will dive in front of the enemy fire to save civilians. If a square containing more than one model is the target of any attack, a Brave model must be targeted if possible. This applies to both shooting and fighting. If more than one Brave model is a possible target then the owner of the Brave models may choose which one leaps in to save the civilians. Obviously, if the shooting model cannot see any Brave models then it cannot target them.

Attacks that hit all models within a square at the same time (such as artillery) are not affected.

Scenario 3: Protect And Serve

In this scenario, Eva and Troy are surprised by a large Martian attack. Will the brave counterattack by hopelessly outnumbered soldiers buy them enough time to get to safety?

• Decide who will play the noble defenders of Humanity, and who will play the dastardly Martian menace.
• Set out your scenery to provide an even mix of high and low cover across the board. Use street furniture, rubble or roadblocks to provide some cover in the roadways.
• The heavy black line under the blue square shows where you should place the most intact wall you have.

• Shuffle the 10 Critter and Alien Secret counters face down. Then, using one dice for rows and another for columns, randomly place 8 of them, one at a time, on the board (see page 9). Put the remaining 2 counters to one side.
• Shuffle the cards and deal 4 to each player face down. The remaining cards are placed face down beside the board as a draw deck within easy reach of both players. The players may look at their own cards at any time but not their opponent’s.
• The Martian player places 16 Martian grunts anywhere in the red deployment zone.
• The Human player places Eva and Troy in the blue square.
• The Human player places 6 soldiers plus the Sergeant anywhere in the green deployment zone.
• The Martian player takes the first Turn.
• VPs are awarded for:
  • Humans only – Moving Eva or Troy off the board via a numbered square (+VPs equal to the number of the square the model moves off from – see the map).
  • Humans only – Alien Secrets (+1 VP per counter, not counting the first).
  • Martians only – Killing Eva or Troy (+4 VPs each).
  • Martians only- Killing the Sergeant (+1 VP).
  • Martians only – Critters (+1 VP per counter, not counting the first).

Stats for a couple of Heroes. I’ll put up a scenario for them tomorrow. However, before we get to their stats, you need the proper rules for Heroics.

Heroics

Heroes do heroic things, but even heroes have limits. To keep our Heroes suitably dramatic (but not overpowered), each one has a number of points to spend on Heroics. Each point of Heroics can be spent on a number of different options that varies depending on the individual hero. Use the Heroics counters to keep track of the amount left to each Hero. This limit is for a single battle, and will be renewed at the start of the next game.

Heroics are used in three ways:

1)   To avoid damage. Whenever a hero is “killed” by an attack from any source, they automatically spend a point of Heroics to ignore the damage completely. This happens immediately. If the hero has no points left to spend then they are killed. If you can think of any suitably heroic last words that would help them rest easy.

2)   To get more done in their Turn. In addition to taking a Turn in the same way as a Soldier, a Hero can spend up to one point of Heroics to either:

1. Move one extra square.
2. Shoot an enemy model.
3. Fight an enemy model that is in the same square.

This is in addition to any movement, shooting or fighting already done by the Hero in their Turn. This may be used at either the start of their Turn or at the end, but not in the middle.

3)   Use a Heroic ability. If the Hero has an Heroic ability then they may trigger it at the cost of a point of Heroics. See the list of Heroic abilities for individual effects. When this point is spent depends on the ability. Each time a model uses one of these abilities it costs that model a point of Heroics.

Protect And Serve

First up, Eva. Greenville’s 5-0 in person.

Her stats are:

• Shoot: 3+
• Fight: 4+
• Survive: 5+
• Range: 3
• Heroics: 4
• Notes: Authority

Heroic Ability: Authority

The model is in control!

A model with this ability may take the first Turn in a Round for their side, regardless of which side would normally start. This model must be the first to act in this first Turn. Other than that, the Turn is completed as normal.

If both players want to use this ability then the model belonging to the side that would normally go first in a Round gets the first Turn. Both models would pay a point of Heroics in this situation.

Teenage Angst

Then we have Eva’s favourite perp, the wayward teenager Troy. Yeah, whatever.

His stats are:

• Shoot: 4+
• Fight: 6+
• Survive: 5+
• Range: 6
• Heroics: 3
• Notes: Too Many Late Nights

Heroic Ability: Too Many Late Nights

The model has spent thousands of hours playing online games as a deadly assassin, and understands the cunning involved in the perfect hit.

A model with this ability gets a free move of one square if it fails to kills its target with a shooting attack. The “duck back” move must be taken immediately or it will be lost.

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 🙂