Another week, another round of DPS with the kiddo. He’s really getting into it, which is great to see. This week, we tested a style of mission I’ve been toying with: you place five objective points on the map and may ‘tap’ each one for a single action each game turn. The outer four gain you 1D5 points, while the center objective gains you 1D10. One of my goals with the game is to have it be a ‘nail biter’ more often than not, so the randomized points help reduce the potential for an early win.

Our match started with my son pushing directly up the center and capturing the middle objective, then laying tons of smoke down to block all obvious lines of sight. He even went as far as to stand his models in the smoke so they could not be shot.

I started by swinging my assault vector (a melee hero and four shotguns) onto my right flank, while contesting the center with my general vector (assault rifles and an all-rounder hero). We took some losses but got into position to contest the middle.

The real swing was due to all the smoke. We crowded the board so badly (and easily, note on that later) that I was able to burst a shotgun through the smoke and hit all of his backliners he concentrated on a rear objective. He learned a lesson about not blocking his own snipers with smoke.

I was able to take out his entire back-line vector in a single exceptionally lucky shot. He was understandably quite upset until I pointed out that he won.

See, while I was being fancy, he was tapping objectives. The goal was to get to 50 and the center objective laughed at me with a measly 5 points on 1D10. I finished the game with 44 points. He wrapped up with 53, thanks to a final remaining model in position to tap a backline objective.

It was a great game. I fell for the classic trap of eliminating an enemy while that enemy just played the objective.

That said, it did expose a problem with smoke. It was way too easy to clog the board and that’s because smoke doesn’t go away. Moving forward, we’ll roll on every smoke template at the end of the turn to see if it disappears.

Otherwise, I was happy with the game. My only concern is that with a vector eliminated, he was in a position where recovery was basically impossible. It happened late game, but was also a single action. Given the more “arcade” nature of the game, I don’t want a dramatic hit like that to just end things. I’m thinking through activation-system based solutions to this issue and I’ll test one this upcoming weekend. More details in a future post.

Otherwise? He’s into it and super looking forward to painting up a saurian force next. Even if the game goes nowhere, it’s winning on the dad front, and I’m thankful for that. That said, with an updated activation system, I think I’m close to saying the game is in it’s alpha state, at which point I might try to sucker an adult or two into playing it. We’ll see.

Or I’ll buy Halo. Don’t look at my Amazon cart…