This last part of the thread will describe how the game played out at BLAM over the weekend of 12-15 Oct. The game was played 5 times with 20 out of the 27 people attending managing to get a game. Hopefully they all enjoyed it.
For those who haven't been following the thread the game is based on the spy novel 'Ice Station Zebra' by Alistair Maclean. Set in the late 1950s the plot is that a British agent is sent to the Arctic to carry out an investigation into a SOS recieved from a British Weather Tracking Station. He is transported in one of the first US nuclear submarines which surfaces near the base. The game follows the basic premise of the book but has added a whole host of additional stuff to make the game exciting. It is a RPG based wargame with a bit of sleuthing thrown in.
The board looks like this - with the Ice Station in the SE corner of the board and the US Submarine in the NW corner.
The rescue party were each given a character card, which gave them the background of the game, their character details, their objectives and any special attriubutes that they had. They also had a small amount of equpment, some specific to the character (such as a first aid kit with the medic) and others to be shared amongst them.
The game was divided into 4 phases - the first to get to the Ice Station, the second to carry out the investigation, thirdly to get themselves plus any survivors back to the submarine. The last part involved them declaring what they think happened and who was the villain. This last piece decided who actually won the game.
In most cases the players had to cooperate in order to survive but they always had the option to work alone or even against the others if their character sheet allowed it. Given that the 4 ccharacters represented the British Secret Service, US Naval Intelligence, the CIA and a sleeper KGB agent, no one knowing that the others were also spies, the game was already set with a whole lot of intrigue.
Once they had worked out their plan, the party set off from the submarine. This shot is deliberately darkened to represent the poor light conditions they were travelling under.
Now as anyone knows about my games, there are always twists and turns. The first one represented the actual movement. Although the tiles were laid out in a grid pattern (as per the left hand diagram below), the party did not move directly across the board. As the party crossed from tile to tile the figures were moved in accordance with the right hand pattern. This represented the poor light, the blizzard and of course the fact that hand held compasses do not work at the North Pole.
In fact the only clues they had as to how to navigate their way to the station was a radio direction finder (which gave them their position relative to the submarine) and the knowledge that the Ice Station was to the SE of the submarine. In another twist they were told the battery had a limited (but unspecified) life.
The other twist was the hazards that they might encounter in the Arctic. The first was the cold itself. I kept a counter of each turn the party were outside any shelter using seals as counters. For every 6 turns they lost a health point.
Finally there the random events that might happen represented by event cards. These were turned over at the start of each turn and played accordingly.
The Thin Ice and Crevasse cards were designed to strip away some health but all the parties opted to rope themselves together which negated some of the effects, but in consequence they travelled more slowly, thus incurring more cold weather effects.
The others were encounter events, which weren't in the book but I wanted to add into the game, partly because they
could have happened, but mostly I loved the Copplestone figures and couldn't resist adding them to the game.
The Innuit encounter required them to communicate in sign language. If they managed to speak to the Innuit they could ask them questions and also get any member who had fallen through the ice warmed up. The downside was if they failed then the Innuit would attack them. Two rifle armed Innuit and a Husky take a lot of beating.
The second encounter was with a Polar Bear. All the goups met him but surprisingly his hunting skills (i.e. his dice rolling) was very poor and he only managed to inflict minor wounds on one character in each group. Shouts of "SHOOT THE BEAR" rang out each time he was encountered, which added to the excitement as character after character missed his shots with the bear inffectually mauling one of the party.
More to follow in the next post.
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April 20, 2024, 04:43:33 PM
December 11, 2007, 08:58:00 PM