Battlestations!

Battlestations!

It has been the running joke for a few months now amongst my game group (usually involving declaring "Battlestations!" at random moments), as we're all anticipating getting to try it out. A few played it at Dragonflight, but I opted to play Arkham Horror (with Kingsport Horror) instead.

I just got a juicy trade for Battlestations and all I had to get rid of was my old copy of Axis and Allies. Sweet!

Has anyone had the chance to play Battlestations yet? It seems to be a good cross between Sci-Fi role-playing and board game, with the possibility of extended campaigns. I'm looking forward to trying it out this week at our regular game night, but I thought I'd check if anyone had any insight.

wow, Axis and Allies for Battlestations? Badass.

I own Battlestations along with all three of its expansion books. My insight: the game is fucking badass.
I don't know how the game is without its expansions, since I picked up the first two along with the game originally...

I have a trade line up of my Stone Age + Race for the Galaxy for Battlestations + Battlelore (THIS TRADE NEEDS MORE "BATTLE"!). Had my eye on Battlestations for a long time, it looks great.

Unless he has second thoughts, I'll definitely have some thoughts on it after I get to muck around with it some. I've always thought it looked like a great game.

Battlestation is a very good crossover between a RPG and a tactical SciFi game. The role playing aspect really is optional, but you do get to build your own character, have some progression with him and a GM is required. The game is played on two different boards, a space board where the ships fly around and a ship board where the characters run around or shoot lasers or prepare for boarding action (which is done by sitting yourself in a rocket and being shot into the enemy ship). It's a good thing that every class has fun playing the game, there's no such thing as a healer missing out in all the action. When it comes to expansion of course the game is easiest to play just with the base game, but I would at least also buy Galactic Civil War (the 1st expansion) which adds fighter bays and another module for the engineer to play around with.

Sometime in the past I heard this was oop, is it again available now?

I know my FLGS recently got a copy of the 1.1 rulebook, but I don't know if they did a full reprint of the game with it.

I think just the rulebook has been reprinted and is for sale.

I scored Battlestations and Galactic Civil War in a math trade a couple months ago. Heavily traded game? Kind of bummed I haven't had the chance to even read the rules, it looks cool as hell. I haven't painted any miniatures in over a year but the character minis for Battlestations are tempting. Something like $60 for lot of all the characters. And I LOVE painting spaceships, with those for Battlestations looking nice. Maybe one day I'll actually get around to this.

I played it once a long time ago and it was crazy zaney fun but...clunky. There seemed to be too much to do and not enough action points to do it. The players won (barely) and I got the honor of being sacrificed on a derelict ship while it slowly drifted deep into outer space...


Great narrative game that never hits the table.

Steve"Noooooo!"Avery

So how about the expansions? I don't have anything but the base game, and am extremely tempted to pick up the Galactic Civil War module. Are they worth the money? Do they add cool stuff?

Anyone played a campaign?

GCW definitely has a solid set of campaign rules. Each of the expansions has a pretty good amount of information- they are about the same size as the main rulebook- each has two new modules, one new race, some new abilities and equipment, as well as new missions and rules for a campaign based around its focus (Star Wars, Star Trek, or.. ehm... Ice Pirates? Is there any iconic movie about pirates in space?).

I haven't had a campaign last very long due to commitments- it took a lot of fighting just to get another D&D group together for 4th edition, arg. If you do run one, definitely make sure the players actually spend their requisitions on a mix of stuff instead of nothing but modules.

I've been having problems getting people together for a campaign, but I do have a couple of questions.

Some of the guys I played the game with decided that it "sucked". Mostly because of how the Science and Engineer characters run around in the ship, pumping the engines and so on. Do the expansions add anything more for each character to do? Do the fighters give a chance for more piloting?

I'm still excited to play it, but with my normal game group decrying it, I don't know how much chance I have now. I'm pretty disappointed, but I'm going to keep fighting to get it played!

Hmm, that's weird. I played a engineer and liked it.

Anyways, Galactic Civil War adds a mine layer module for the engineer and Pax Galacticum add damage control module for the engineer and a sick bay module for the scientist.

Maybe you could try having your players only play marines and pilots and get the ship maintenance done by bots.

I was actually the engineer in my group, and really enjoyed it. It really isn't a problem for me, but I'm glad to see that other modules cater to those occupations as well.

I always recommend the Scientist to split some points into Engineering or Combat and then take a skill that lets him help out a bit more, like Tricky, or Bosun (Pirates of Trundlia, no remote penalty when assisting). He can always ECM or Target Lock even as a pure scientist, though.
Something else to remember as the GM is that you don't have to give them any information outside of the mission briefing, so make the scientist use the science bay for some actual science from time to time.

In our group that did play (and probably won't again), I chose a Zoallan engineer (think 3-armed cockroach) and another guy chose a Zoallan scientist. I chose the name Klik-Klak and the other guy decided to be Klak-Klik. Our characters are exactly complimentary - my primary ability lies in engineering, but science is second, combat is third and piloting is left out. He chose science as his primary, science in second, piloting for third and left combat out. It seems to work pretty well, as we can run an entire ship with just the two characters, and the other characters run amok.

I really enjoyed the scenario we played, and am disappointed my regular game group didn't dig it. They felt there to be too much down time and things like scanning and pumping engines were declared to be "gay".

So now I'm trying to throw together another group so I can my game in.