Dystopian Wars, First Impression

Good morning ladies and gents, I'm coming to you live from the local Chick-fil-a's wifi. I do really wish they were a proud corporate sponsor of us here at DissentingDice. I didn't get into blogging for the money, but chicken sandwiches and waffle fries would be nice. 

So the local gamemonger Aaron of Stormcrow Games and I played out first game of Dystopian Wars yesterday. 

We had a blast, don;t know if we got everything correct, but it was fun. The thrills and spills of exploding dice make the game very swingy, but in a fun way.   The rules are simple on their face, but quite complex when things start interacting with each other. Though we really only had to keep going back again and again to the rulebook when tiny fliers were involved. Most other things were either easy to remember or on the cheat sheet. 

Though, the biggest lesson I learned was deploy your battle ship near the battle, I put mine on the flank and with out a kinetic generator I was well into the game before he started making much of a difference. 

Here is the only picture I managed to snap while we were playing. 

Aaron's fresh out of the box Empire of the Blazing Sun, and my more and more painted FSA. 

I put shield generators on everything that could take them, it did lead to some stupid durability on the cruisers. Having only two dice can mean the difference between 1 damage and a critical hit, or if you roll sixes just negate a huge attack. 

However, this increased durability was at the cost of offensive power, Aaron used his rockets to good effect by chipping away at my frigates or menacing my cruisers. Having the shield brings the cruisers down only the single forward gun (and an aft gun with a 90 degree arc) at least the battle ship still has it's broadsides.  I think having that long range firepower to soften the enemy or sink a few small ships on the way in would be a good idea. The battleship being all but immune to single digit dice rolls because of the shield sounds like a much better idea on it. 

Also bombers don't seem that cool to me, and it's  hard to use the bombs. They use fixed channels, and the bombs are out the back. So you would need to do the sort of hilarious turning maneuvers that Aaron did so that he could fire bombs out the back at my cruisers. Something we messed up on, bombs are only 4 inch range, not range band 1 i.e. 8 inches, so they are even more of something you don't try to use and just get lucky when you can. Lame.  However my bombers did finally sneak up obscured and throw a lot of torpedoes at his battleship, actually doing some damage to the monster. 

All in all this was a really fun game, the rules are very different from GW games or Warma/Hordes, there are a lot of moving parts and it will take some getting used to. Though after we figured our that we can pre-measure that would have made things easier. But driving into the middle of the enemy and unleashing guns all over the place was really cool, as Aaron showed me beating the crap out of my cruiser squadron with some frigates. 

So, yet another ringing endorsement of Dystopian Wars.