We come in peace…Shoot to kill

Welcome to part 2 of theTrek Hulk mashup “It’s Trek Jim but not as we know it”.

For those that can’t remember and can’t be arsed to go back a post, an Away Team from the USS Cousteau have beamed aboard a damaged Borg recon vessel in order to download its communication logs.

The following pictures and text help illustrate some of the rules and are not, you’ll be relieved to hear, an exhaustive blow by blow account of the game.

The Away Team head out up the corridor with security officer Ensign Ginsella and her phaser rifle in the lead. The miniatures have 4 action points to spend plus the chance of a 1-6 command point boost to this total each turn - which could be translated into extra movement if I wanted, though moving more than 3 squares per turn automatically switches the Borg from ambivalent and semi dormant to full on hostile mode.

Should I get the Away Team to leg it or opt for caution? The orange counter in the middle of the countdown stack indicates the buggers will come to life whatever I do on turn 5, but until then I suspect it might be best to make as much progress as I can without disturbing them.

Note that until the Borg become actively hostile the Away Team player controls the movement of any of those not in a regeneration alcove and MUST roll 1D6-2 for their movement every turn. A negative die roll outcome means an individual Borg will stay where it is but anything positive means it has to move that number of squares.

The die roll for the Borg in the nearest corridor recess was a 2 so he didn’t move, but just to be on the safe side I put Ensign Ginsella on overwatch using the action points I hadn’t used on movement.

The team tiptoes past the Borg in the recess and spreads out to leave a 1 square gap between them. Once again unused action and command points were used to put the Ensign on point into overwatch. Anything coming down the corridor was going to have a nasty surprise.

Which was all fine until I rolled for the mandatory Borg movement and got a 5. Even with a -2 deduction he was still required to move 3 squares and obviously couldn’t.

There are 4 things that will tip the Borg into instant hostility; weapon fire, interaction with an objective, rapid movement and yes…blocking the path of a moving drone. 2 of 10 stepped out into the corridor behind Ensign Ginsella but couldn’t go any further. He was not best pleased.

Finding his path blocked 2 of 10 became immediately hostile which meant (since the Borg are all linked together by a single hive mind) that all of the other buggers had suddenly become hostile too. Dammit. So much for the stealthy approach.

2 of 10 had only used 1 point to move into the corridor and still had two points left which was enough to initiate a melee on the unsuspecting Ensign. Ginsella had been placed on overwatch, a stance that allows her to fire at any moving enemy outside of the Away Teams turn however she was carrying the phaser rifle which cannot be fired at targets in an adjacent square. The Borg roll 2d6 in melee and pick the highest score while Starfleet officers roll 1d6. Highest scoring mini wins the melee. Note there is no facing aspect at work here as there is in Space Hulk.

2 of 10 rolled badly but Ginsella, who in fairness was looking the other way at the time, rolled even worse. Assimilation tubules shot out of the Borgs wrist and burrowed into the security officers neck. Assimilation in Trek Hulk is a two part process, and though Ginsella now had millions of transformative nanobots swarming through her body the length of time it takes to become fully Borgified varies from individual to individual. 

Luckily for the stricken Ginsella, Lt Posc (the Away Team medic) was next in line behind and he launched straight into a melee of his own with 2 of 10. Posc has a hand phaser of course and could’ve just shot at the Borg, but I forgot in all the  “excitement”. Lol. Posc bravely grappled the drone while Ginsella lay writhing on the deck plates in transformative agony. Could the doughty Denobulan medic save her? Well yes it seemed he could. His melee die roll was a 6 and the best that  old Borgy chops could muster was a 5.

2 of 10 is removed from the board but will be recycled as a new drone as soon as a regeneration alcove is empty. 

With sufficient action points remaining Posc injects Ginsella with a shot of Federation anti assimilation nanobots that hunt down and destroy their Borg counterparts. He only has two  doses of these on him, so he best not to be too liberal with their application.  (Yup this is my own invention and may prove to be unnecessary game wise or a bit OP as the kids say - we’ll have to see).

The Borg are now in hostile mode but a roll of 2 means that only two of the drones on the board can be activated this turn. In the above picture two drones step out of their regeneration alcoves leaving the spots clear for future casualties to re spawn on them. Given that the Borg vessel is considered to be damaged I have not allowed the Borg to use their one in game corridor blocking forcefield.

With no further need for caution the Away Team move quickly towards the target that lies unhelpfully just out of shot on the right.

Drones began to fill the corridor between the Away Team and the target data node. There was a lot of poor shooting and a seemingly never ending stream of targets. In this instance the drone advancing on the Ensign was able to adapt his shielding to her phaser fire when she rolled a double in overwatch - shrugging off the hit.

The Away Team slowly ground their way forward often having to resort to desperate hand to hand action due to Ginsella and the bloody annoying 1 square prohibition on phaser rifle fire. Given that characters can not pass through each other in the narrow corridor or fire weapons around those in front, Ginsella’s weapon was all they’d got to keep the Borg at bay.

Finally the phaser rifle comes in to its own. Fired during the Away Team activation rather than in overwatch it catches a whole line of Borg coming down the corridor. Doubles and adaptive shielding only help save drones during overwatch fire so this time it was all down to getting kill scores on the dice with mods applied for repeated shots at the same target. 

The phaser rifle needs a 5 or 6 to kill and uses two dice per attack. The advantage it has over the regular hand phaser is that it is able to kill an additional enemy in an adjacent square to the original target - if two kills were actually rolled. Two Borg in a line went down to the first shot, leaving those behind them as new prospective targets. More action points were available so Ginsella fired again, achieving yet another two kills with one shot. Sweet.

Times up!  The game turn counter reaches 10 which means the Borg have guessed the Away Teams intent and have fractally encrypted their computer access. No I don’t know what that means either. Ensign Ginsella ducks down a side corridor in order to take the end ladder square up or down to another deck while the gallant Doctor Posc takes up overwatch in the corridor. The first Borg he fires at in overwatch is saved through shield adaptation when the Doctor rolls a double 1. Time to beam out quick sharp!

So the whole thing ended in a Starfleet failure, though I’m sure that Ensign Ginsella will get a mention in the Captain’s log. Sufficient recompense I’m sure you’ll agree.

The whole shebang took 45 minutes to play and only minutes to set up and put back again - which for me is a definite plus. Without a doubt this has proved the most successful of my homebrew rule sets to date and trust me I’m my own worst critic.

Given that I wanted as vanilla a testing set up as I could get I did not use movement between decks via ladders and crawl-ways, overloaded phasers as explosive devices or force fields. Apart from the Doctor doing a bit of healing there was no opportunity for any of the other command, security, science or engineering division specialisations to be used either.

Lessons learned and observations:

It’d be interesting to fight on tiles that are more than 1 square wide or allow for a passing / position swop option between adjacent characters.

Next time I’d take a bigger Away Team and split them into two groups.

I need to think more carefully about the deck plan layouts. The one I used was thrown down in haste and the limited number of approaches to the target looked nice but may have handed an unwitting advantage to the Borg.

I hate the term “going forward” but I have a mind to make my own Federation ship tiles utilising 3d terrain pieces acquired from a good friend of the blog. We’ll see how things turn out after a bit more testing.

Toodle ooh!