For the second time ever, I managed to get Red Alert on the table, and played 3 back-to-back games!
For those unaware, Red Alert is the sci-fi version of the Command and Colo(u)rs system by Richard Borg. Memoir '44 is the best known, but he has also done fantasy (Battlelore) and scifi, as well as a huge swathe of various historical periods.
The rules are very simple on the surface: ships come in 3 flavours, Fighters (green circles), Strike craft (blue triangles), and Capital ships (purple squares). The dice have 1 of each result, plus a wild, a Star, and a “Red Alert” result so when you attack, the “hits” are the results that are a wild or are the thing you are shooting at. Each turn you play a card that tells you what you can activate (“3 units on the Left Wing” or “All Strike Craft in your fleet”), you move everything, and then you attack with whatever you activated. “Red Alert” results on the dice force your target to retreat, and if they can’t they take casualties (plus it reduces your attack pool of dice by 1).
So far, so C&C. The Red Alert changes are pretty big, though:
- There is now a currency. “Stars” are earned at the end of your turn (2 of them, or 1 and a Combat Card, we’ll get back to that), and you can spend them to do all sorts of things: remove a Red Alert result, increase the speed of a unit by 1, “Battle Back” (allowing you to attack a unit that just attacked you if any of them survived), “Follow Up” with a Destroyer unit (move into a space vacated by a retreating or eliminated enemy and then attack again), or activate a huge number of Combat Cards.
- Combat Cards! These are all special abilities that cost Stars (usually between 1-4) to play, but give you various bonuses: perhaps a discount on repairing a Red Alert or doing a Follow Up, or letting you roll more dice for attack, or perhaps cancelling an opponent’s attack. Lots of variety, but all fuelled by this very limited resources.
The Stars are earned when you roll Star results on a die when attacking, so you are constantly launching attacks to get the money you need to use these neat and powerful effects. Clever.
So here’s my complaint: a lot of the cards are walls of text. Like, a LOT of text. And the ship models are beautiful but simply too big: a “Heavy Squadron” of Destroyers, Cruisers, or Battleships are 4 models, and 4 Battleships just doesn’t fit in the already huge hexes (we ended up using 3 Battleships and a Fighter to demarcate the additional HP, because the models are literally just the number of hits required to eliminate a unit most of the time). The game also gains a tonne of additional mileage from the expansion content, specifically Dreadnaughts (shorter range than Battleships, but they hit harder until they are damaged) and Carriers (they can move OR they can launch 3 little Carrier Fighters that hit for 2 dice each… since a Destroyer unit hits for 3 dice at close range, and your extremely valuable Flagship hits with 5 at point-blank, the Carrier’s ability to reach out and hit with 6 dice at 4 hex is incredibly powerful). The rest of the expansion content is neat.
So, three games of it! First was a tutorial to learn the ropes (Mike won by taking out my Flagship), but we skipped the second tutorial game to play the Cardinal’s Belt scenario (simple one where you gain VP for eliminating enemy ships, as usual, but also through controlling an entire Wing with no enemy ships in that section of the map), and then the first mission with a planet. I won both of the later missions.
It was good! But, man, it is fiddly compared to the other C&Cs I’ve played (Memoir, Rome, and Battlelore). The addition of the Star economy is neat, but the tradeoff is that in order to make “fragile” ships more fragile there is a whole “Shields and Maneouver” mechanic that is inelegant and constantly requires checking a chart to see if your hits count as hits (basically bigger ships ignore “wild” hit results from smaller ships, except fighters which ignore 1 “wild” result from a Capital Ship). Not crazy about that, but since the other C&Cs have 2 results for the “fragile” units (Infantry usually), and that 2nd results was replaced with the Star… yeah. It’s too bad. No clean way to solve that… I would’ve used Shield Tokens for bigger ships so they just have more health, but whadda-I-know.
I’m looking forward to trying it again in a few weeks.
Anyway, after that,we played 2 missions of Mass Effect with 4 players, and it went pretty well. Shepard, Tali, Wrex, and Garrus, and we did the entry mission and then Wrex’s Loyalty mission. Good fun, nice, clean co-op that definitely doesn’t deserve the hate it gets. I’m mostly upset because it makes it incredibly unlikely it will get an expansion or two, and it deserves it. Solid game design.
And then after THAT we played 2 rounds of Regicide, which we lost on the 2nd Queen. I don’t know how to win that game.
