Mega City One Spring Clean Challenge

Now that the buildings are done, it’s time to get a few games in. Obviously my three newly painted buildings will be the centerpiece of the table, but I did need to fill it out a little bit with some papercraft buildings from Dave Graffam. Since the mat features a road going through the middle, I’ve also added some cars – most are from Black Site Studios, with one of Warlord’s Hover Vans. We won’t be using the vehicle rules in this first game, but we came up with a simple house rule to move each vehicle 6” after each character activation, rolling a die when they need to decide whether to turn left or right. It’s a nice simple way to make the game feel like it’s taking place in a populated area.

We’ve chosen the Ambush scenario from the Judge Dredd rule book. It doesn’t seem too complicated and I like the idea of one side setting up in the center and the other in the surrounding area, rather than starting on opposite sides and running to the middle. The scenario’s win conditions seem a little lopsided – the defending player just has to move half (rounding up) of their models off any board edge, which seems pretty easy. The attacking player has to stop them, which presumably means incapacitating or subduing over half of the opponent’s force.

The rules describe a 50 point game as mid-sized, but in reality that only gives us 3 models each – the average model seems to be in the 15-20 point range, with only nameless block gangers and citi-def soldiers coming in at under 12 points. Looking over the models we have available I’m drawn to SJS Judge Gerhart and Wally Squad (undercover) Judge Aimee Nixon. My opponent wants to play street Judges, so we settle on a story where Aimee Nixon has received dubious information about a group of corrupt Judges, leading Judge Gerhart to set up an ambush for them. Whether or not they are actually corrupt probably doesn’t matter to Judge Gerhart, he’s a bit of a zealot when it comes to rooting out bent Judges…

My force is rounded out by a 12-point Citi-Def trooper with a rocket launcher (Gerhart and Nixon clearly can’t trust any Judges to back them up). My opponent’s force consists of a Veteran Street Judge, a regular Street Judge, and Cadet Giant, who is in for one hell of a training day.

My opponent starts in a pretty good position, with all three Judges in cover. I get to start the game with one of my models off the table, to be brought in from any table edge later in the round. I figure this will be helpful since my opponent’s win condition is simply to leave the board – once I know which direction they’re headed I can move my reinforcement to intercept. I start with Nixon and the Citi-Def trooper on the board and Gerhart in reserve.

My rocket launcher gets off one good shot before getting taken out by a Seeker round, which ignores line of sight rules. The game uses cards to add flavor, with each player staring out with a handful of Armory cards (such as the aforementioned seeker) which tend to modify attacks and defenses, and “Big Meg” cards that introduce the general chaos of Mega City One. We both get some good use out of our Big Meg cards – my opponent uses “Munce for Brains” to limit the Citi-Def trooper to a single action on his turn, but since one of my models is a member of the undercover Wally Squad, I get to start with an extra “Wally Squad” card that allows me to steal my opponent’s turn and activate one of my models instead.

I decide to bring in Judge Gerhart on the opposite side of my opponent’s position to try for a flanking maneuver. It is somewhat successful, and I am able to immobilize one of my opponent’s Judges using a “Boing” armory card, which traps the target in bouncy plastic. That’s one Judge immobilized, if I can just trap or eliminate one more I’ll have this game. Neither of my opponent’s remaining judges is within a move action of the board edge, however…

This is where the somewhat egregious nature of this game comes in. Judge Dredd determines activation order by drawing chips out of a cup, so my opponent is able to activate both characters before I get a chance to go again. For Cadet Giant my opponent plays “Crazie!” which allows him a free Charge action ahead of his normal activation, which he uses to get down the stairs from the roof of Mac’s Mek repair. He is then able to use his activation to double move, allowing him to get off the board. Similarly, my opponent’s Veteran Street Judge gets lucky with a Sprint action, which allows the model a double move with an extra d6” of movement – my opponent rolls a 6, and the Veteran Judge is off the board, ending the game with a win for my opponent.

Since the game ended so abruptly, we’ve decided to play a second game.

This time we’re going to increase to 100 reputation points so we can get more models on the table, and we’re going to try out the vehicle rules. At 35 points, Judge Dredd himself is unlikely to appear in a smaller game, so for my force I’ve decided to start with him and round it out with a few support Judges and the mighty Lawmaster, a vehicle that has its own A. I., making it function as an additional model even without a driver.

My opponent has elected to try to swarm me with robots, taking robot-controlling gangster Nero Narcos and a small army (okay, seven) of various reprogrammed service bots. They’ll also have a Grav Pod, a fairly speedy flying vehicle that might be handy for the Heist scenario we’ve chosen.

Set up is similar to the previous game, with the defender placing their models in the center of the board and the attacker surrounding. I’ll be playing the defender this time. I get to keep half of my force in reserve, so I’ve elected to have Judge Dredd and his Lawmaster bike start off the table, reasoning that with the bike’s increased speed it will be easier to get him where he is needed quickly.

In addition to our models, the scenario instructs us to place three objective tokens within 6” of the center of the board. The attacker (my opponent) must pick up at least two of these and carry them off any board edge in order to win. One small mercy is that a model carrying an objective can’t use any of the double move options. My models can pick the objectives up but can’t carry them to safety, and will drop them if successfully hit in an attack. My goal is to prevent my opponent from winning, which I guess means incapacitating all of their models.

Maybe it’s the increased model count, maybe it’s the less well defined victory conditions, but this game is a bit of a slog for us. The action never moves farther than 10 inches from the center of the board as we trade off picking up and dropping objectives. Judge Dredd himself rides his Lawmaster bike right into the center of the action, only to have it destroyed beyond repair by my opponent’s DemoBot.

We do get a few fun, comic book moments. My opponent has a bunch of oversized utility robots packed into the Grav Pod like a clown car, and his cleaning robot manages to hold on to an objective longer than anyone else. The Grav Pod, ironically driven by a MedBot, commits vehicular homicide by backing up over my Tech Judge.

Across the street, I manage to play a “Boingers” Big Meg card to great effect, resolving a devastating area effect attack that takes out three of my opponent’s robots, thematically destroyed by adrenaline-junkie citizens who bounce around the city encased in springy plastic balls.

We play for two and a half hours with no clear resolution in sight, and so decide to call this game a draw.

I’ve given my general thoughts about the game on my game review blog, but to summarize: I like the models and components a lot, but I don’t think I care for the rule set. Every attack requires two opposed rolls, meaning that to make an effective attack I have to succeed at an attack roll, my opponent has to fail an evade roll, then I have to succeed at a damage roll, and my opponent has to fail at their resist roll. It’s an awful lot of rolling, and a lot of chances to fail.

Additionally, the scenarios seem a little under-written and poorly thought out. In both of our games, one side had either a much easier win condition or a poorly defined one like “prevent the other player from succeeding.”

The Big Meg and Armory cards are meant to provide flavor and variety, and sometimes they succeeded, adding little, unpredictable details to prevent the game from getting stale. However they just as often led to an unfair advantage for one side of the other – one card in particular, “Confusion Reigns!” was devastating, taking away two of my action chips which essentially stopped me from being able to play for the rest of the turn.

I love the models and the setting, and I definitely want to keep gaming in Mega City One, but I don’t think I want to do it using this rule set. One possibility might be to house rule in order to simplify the game and come up with some more interesting scenarios. Another option would be to switch to a different set of rules. 7TV is an obvious choice, or really any game with a vaguely futuristic urban setting. One thing we thought was missing from the game was the sense that the environment was a populated city – it seemed like we were fighting on deserted streets. With that in mind, something that handles non-player civilians well would be good. Possibly a re-skin of Core Space, with block gangs or other villains replacing the killer robots. I would love to hear other suggestions from the community.

If nothing else, I think the old GW Block Mania board game (recently reprinted by Rebellion Studios) is designed so that the cardboard counters can be replaced with miniatures…