Finally... Sedition Wars!

With reference to my previous post… now that I’ve managed to paint my Sedition wars minis (not all, but enough) I started playing the final 3 missions. 

Mission 7 was blowing up the facility by triggering the self-destruct sequence. I replayed this mission about 4 times, mainly due to the fact that I didn’t read the rules properly and relied on my memory. My bad.

Anyway, this mission is finely tuned and can go either way. It all boils down to your dice rolls. Get some bad ones and you might not be able to take out a critical enemy in time that can spoil your plans… or make a basic error in tactical positioning and have the enemy swoop in behind your back and ruin your day. Exploding 6's and some dice bonuses help to mitigate the luck factor, but still... nothing is going to change the fact that when you roll a couple of 1's you're not gonna be able to hit anything.

It also gave me a lot of cinematic moments in game play, like:

Strain spawning from corpses.

Strain burning up after being set on fire and failing to get rid of said fire.

Strain evolving into a higher level form. (First time I managed to successfully pull this off!)

Human Vanguard dissolving into a puddle of organic material (sadly no photos as I don’t have a way to represent that as a mini or token).

Mission 8 has the Vanguard trying to rescue civilians before the Strain are able to round up 6 hapless civilians to further their nefarious plans to create a fearsome Strain construct to carry the Strain virus to the stars.

I played this 3 times as I discovered force composition and core tactics are vital in this game. The wrong force composition can ruin your plans, as can faulty tactics… like bunching up in a narrow passageway, Basic errors that get swiftly punished.

In the end the Vanguard won 2-1, with the final battle teetering between a Strain victory or a Vanguard one. The Strain managed to Infect the 6 civilians they needed, but weren’t able to herd them all away, as the Vanguard blasted away all the Strain one by one, but not without some losses. 

Now: why am I gushing over what is essentially a board game?

IMHO: the way the rules are set up, it’s basically a minis skirmish game packaged as a board game.

You have minis you need to assemble.

You have force building lists.

You get overwatch and a whole host of other minis skirmish rules (with the notable exception of pulling out of base to base combat which doesn’t have any penalty).

In fact, once I complete mission 9, I plan to play some of the strategic mission (what other games would call one-off, randomly generated missions) and use the Core space game mat and terrain and use a ruler to measure off distances. I’ll let you know how that goes, but so far my experience of the game doesn’t show any reason why that wouldn’t work.

I’m aware nothing I say will change the poor reception this game has gotten thanks to its Kickstarter missteps... nothing that those experienced with minis-heavy Kickstarter campaigns won't be surprised about but remember this was in the early days (2013? 2014?). As for me, I bought the core set at retail then tracked down a complete KS pledge without the extra add-ons, so my view of the game isn’t tainted by that.

However thanks once more to the sterling work done by the Esoteric Order of Gamers, the game is now playable as it should be, and offers an experience that is unique (in my experience) due to the Strain abilities. Do you just attack the Vanguard with Corrosive abilities, not leaving a corpse behind? Or go for an Infection route, where you can then mutate the infected humans into Strain, or kill them some other way, leaving corpses behind that the Strain can reanimate as space zombies? The possibilities are endless!

OK, now I need to go and paint enough minis (100 points) for me to play Mission 9, the last and final mission. Gaaahhhh...