Star Schlock...the continuing adventures!

 

Last weekend was the second Saturday of the month, and so the Scrum Club met once again in my dining room for a day of gaming. As I've mentioned in recent posts, the pandemic built up such a demand for in-person gaming amongst the Scrummers that we've expanded the itinerary from a single miniatures game that we start around 4:30 to now include an additional game at 1:00 p.m. as a prelude of sorts to the main event. The earlier game has a bit of a shorter time allotment (we have to start and finish within roughly three hours), and we allow for board games and RPG one-offs to hit the table in this first slot (the "headliner" 4:30 game will almost always remain a miniatures game of some sort).

Since starting to meet in person again this past May, the first game of the day has been a board game (GKR: Heavy Hitters twice) or an RPG. Last month Rich M. ran a great game of Traveller-cum-Thieves' World, and this month Jared S. had us try a game of Blades in the Dark, which I believe was new to all of us, including Jared the GM.

Blades in the Dark, as some may know, falls more in the "story" game category, with much of the scenario and unfolding action becoming the responsibility of the players rather than the GM. While I know these games have been around for a while, it's only my second time playing one of these paradigm-subverting rulesets, the first being Dungeon World around a decade ago. I can't really count my Dungeon World experience, though, because the GM of that game hadn't really wrapped his head around how to run the system as intended, and it ended up feeling like a weirdly unsatisfying traditional role playing game.

I'm not sure I'm a fan of this sort of RPG, but I'm trying to reserve judgment. It certainly seems easy to run from the GM perspective, that's for sure, and it's probably great for a table full of frustrated, wannabe GMs. I like a certain amount of cohesion and consistency of tone, theme, and narrative in my RPG settings and scenarios, and "story games" tend to throw that out the window, from my admittedly limited experience. I like the "authorial voice" of a GM or a well-crafted module. And certain mechanics, like the "flashback" in Blades in the Dark, seem to short-circuit some of the narrative tension a traditional system and GM can orchestrate over the course of a scene or vignette.

Misgivings aside, I actually had a fun time with the game, and it's probably unfair to judge it based on this one-off mission we played. The designers have obviously focused a lot of thoughtful attention on its version of an experience point/leveling system, and the game clearly is designed to foster players creating long overarching plots and byzantine subplots that could only happen over a series of consecutive games. Negotiating all of that as one player/storyteller among many at the table might prove as vexing as exhilarating, especially if not everyone at the table shares the same sensibilities. This past Saturday, however, it was more of the latter, and I'm really glad we gave it a try.

Let's move on to the headliner game...

Star Schlock

Both me personally and the Scrum Club as a group have been playtesting versions of Star Schlock for 2-3 years now, and it remains fun and challenging. The basic mechanics are locked in and run quite well, and now John S. (the game's designer) is trying to add some important elements such as designing scenarios with rational victory point scoring.

This was an unusually large game of Star Schlock, with seven players running four factions on the table. John, the eighth of us in attendance for this second Saturday, sat out and acted as referee. One of the pleasures this past weekend was getting to play with many of the new figures John sculpted and is about to take into mass production to fulfill the really successful Kickstarter he ran a few months back.

Even with this many teams and players, the game still moves along at a swift clip, and battles prove fun and deadly. Poor Jared and his visiting brother Jason started in between Rich and Walt's team and my and Francesco's team, and so their units pretty quickly started to crumple from the pressure. Important scenario design lessons were learned...though in fairness the limitations of physical table space compounded by the large number of players who attended made scenario balance a challenge.

The points assigned to various teams, who all had asymmetric missions, was a bit out of whack, with the Necronauts played by Steve B.--who everybody assumed, including Steve, had fared poorly--somehow ending up beating every other team by a magnitude of two or three once the points were tallied. My teammate Francesco and I felt all game long that we had done at least as well and likely better than everyone else and were baffled when the point tally at the end of the final round put us close to last. But, again, this is why you playtest, and it certainly didn't detract one iota from the fun time we had moving these great miniatures across John's always-impressive tabletop tableaus.

A Note on the Photos: My wife Ellen was under the weather and wasn't able to take any photos this past Saturday, so 90% or more of these are by my far inferior hand (a couple might have been stolen from Walt's Facebook feed, though it's hard for me to say which ones, alas). As usual, click any of them to enlarge.

The battlefield before play.

A couple of the great sculpts by John S. for his Astroguards Kickstarter!

Left to right: John, Jason S., Jared S., and Rich M.

Left to right: Jared S., Rich M., and Walt O.

I love the little laser tokens John created. They're not just aesthetically pleasing, but they serve a mechanical purpose in the game for tracking who needs to reload in a turn.

Steve B. on the far right

Steve B. (left) played the Necronauts, while Francesco N. (right) and I played the federation of good guys (or something like that).

Astroguards sculpted by John S.

Before: Yay! We reached the space diplomat and convinced him to let us escort him to safety! After (moments later): We've just been thrown to our deaths by a giant Star Spawn.

A lot of games of Star Schlock have a goodly number of civilians roaming about, usually getting in the way...

I enjoyed sending that sword-wielding alien weirdo to his star grave.

Rod Roebuck and the Astroguards!

The Star Schlock after-party is always the hottest in the galaxy!

Parting Shots and Closing Thoughts

Would I play Star Schlong again? Probably not...

Kidding! Of course I will...we've been having a good time with these rules for a while now, and it has been fun being part of the development process. I enjoyed seeing John reintroduce in this session some random events between rounds, and in a similar vein I hope he starts looking for ways to work the "spectacle" mechanic back into the game that we had tested a couple of years ago. John's a creative dynamo, and it's always fun to see what he comes up with next.

If you liked some of the miniatures you saw here, many of them can be attained with a late pledge to John's Kickstarter. Just visit his website for more details...you won't be disappointed!

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