FUBAR Ruminations

Woah, four posts in four days, this blog just might be back.  It's amazing how much more time a guy has when he's not coaching his daughter's soccer team to a league championship.  That's right, I know how to coach soccer - the secret is inheriting kids from other coaches who know what the heck they are doing.

Same scenario. Different rules.  Different results.

This weekend, our first game of FUBAR pit two evenly matched forces in a fight for the mining station.  The humans consisted of roughly 25 Veteran troops backed up by three 2-man HMGs and a sniper team.  The lizardfolk had 20 infantry and 5 cavalry at their disposal.  For the purposes of learning the game, we classified the cavalry as vehicles armed only with a single HMG.  In both cases, we used units of roughly 5 men/lizards with the snipers operating alone, and the cavalry split into two units of 2 and 3 lizards.  Aaaaand, fight!

We spent a fair few minutes hashing out what the rules mean by ‘unit’.  In retrospect, it doesn’t really matter from a balance perspective.  Large units means more guys sitting around when they fail to activate. Small units mean that you always have at least a few guys doing something, even if they aren’t as effective as the big groups when they do act.

To big for infantry, too small for vehicles.  Time for Rule One!

We treated the cavalry as vehicles, but it felt wrong.  They were too tough to bring down, and the idea that they have more armor in front is a bit silly.  In retrospect, I’d treat them as vehicles except that every hit should be classified as against the rear armor (roll twice and take the higher result).  That makes them more fragile than tanks, but keeps them fast and dangerous.

We also had a talk about what the lizard-mounted guys were armed with on a personal basis.  He sweet talked me into allowing them to have assault rifles, when I figured the little blue shlubs would be hard pressed to work a big cannon with one strapped to their back.  Not a big deal, but something that should be worked out on both sides before the game starts.

Space-bug-angel-demons!

With this experience under our belts, we're amped up to try the bug rules from the "Generic Sci-Fi" one page supplement.  It looks like they'll handle very different from standard troops.  That's another thing that felt off with our test run - the lizards didn't feel alien enough - but that's a function of using the rules in as vanilla a fashion as possible to get a handle of things.

Next time will be different.