Scavenge Skirmish Survive Battle Reports

This Saturday saw me play my first ever games of PA in the form of Scavenge Skirmish Survive. Xander turned up with a KR case full of suitable models with S3 stat cards to match, and between his scatter terrain and Vanguard's snow board we put together two very good looking boards.

The end of the line - my forces appear from the right, Xander's from the left.

The bands closed quickly on each other with both of us getting used to the movement rules and activation bubble as well as concealed movement rules. Because there were only two of us playing a game intended for multi-player participation, we quickly abandoned the activation order cards in favour of just rolling dice, with odds numbers drawing event cards.

Xander's sniper laid down some fairly ineffective fire while my group swarmed up the column of rusting cars, plundering them for anything that remained. I found a medikit and a sledge while Xander's band managed to scrounge up some items as well, but no food.

Things really got interesting when Xander took up a defensive position between the Wheetabix lorry and the trees. And I drew the Wolves! event card.

Everything's worse with wolves...

Suddenly, a situation that had been looking extremely dicey for my strung out group turned on its head as, over the next few turns the wolves went all The Grey on Xander's men. They have a +3 bonus in melee.

With the canines distracting his attention and then eviscerating much of his force my band managed to regroup and push into the area around the house.

"Hands up all those who ain't dead yet..."

In a blaze of mediocrity my shotgun and SMG armed youths managed to fell a survivor of the wolf attack and Xander after pinging a last frozen paintball my way decided it was time to fall back.

After a chat about putative campaign structure rules we reconfigured the battlefield into a business park set up and drew forces randomly from among Xander's collection

The set up, half way through the game

Setting up diagonally across from each other on a 6 by 4 board meant we had a lot of space and time to manoeuvre. I went scavenging through the buildings finding food and fuel and setting up a stockpile while Xander made the smart move of making a beeline for the more resource intensive car park.

Despite getting a very nice band evenly divided between a gun and melee group, including an assault rifle my immediate plan was scuppered when the first event card drawn was Out of Ammo and we tied, meaning our men had brought guns to a knife fight, but forgotten their ammo.

A short blizzard claimed an isolated member of the opposing band while mine massed for an assault on the men in the carpark. This got a to a farcical start when my cultist ran down a youth armed with a catapult and was unceremoniously killed by a pebble to the face.

His mates soon avenged him...

The assault proceeded into the carpark, bottling up most of Xander's force while his sniper who had found a tin of ammo laid down rather ineffective defensive fire.

The final showdown, with Haribo loot.

A final push into the carpark followed by a counter attack finished things off in my favour. Things got a little dicey when a youth with a greatsword rushed into melee but by then I knew how to play the melee game and some careful positioning brought him down.

The two games were great introductions to the genre and the system, and were beautifully represented as well. I hope that the next time we meet, Team Retard as I'm calling my collection, is up to standard.

Tomorrow I'll post some notes about rules issues that came to light as we were playing.