Battlestations is a combination between a tactical board game and a role playing game. A group that likes both should get along well with it.

I'd been dying to run Battlestations for years, and finally had the right group of people. So we created characters, and I ran them through a modified version of the Assault Planet scenario from the core rule book. There are no real spoilers in this particular mission, so if you haven't played it yet you should be safe reading through this.

If you haven't read through my Battlestations Review yet, you might want to take a look at that to get an overview of the game.

We ended up with a Trundlian Pilot, a Fungaloid engineer, and a human marine. Our scientist couldn't make it that night, so we used a science bot as a replacement. If you're not familiar with Battlestations, each species has special abilities, and each character can take special abilities.

Our Trundlian pilot could, by virtue of being Trundlian, do a bit of morphing of his shape to transfer points from his Move to his Hit Points. He decided to weld himself to the pilot's chair by maxing out his Hit Points. His character special ability was Hot Dog, which allows him to succeed on piloting rolls that would otherwise fail, but the effect on the ship is often as bad as if he'd failed.

The Fungaloid engineer, as a Fungaloid regenerated Hit Points at the end of every round. This ended up being very useful. His character special ability was Unsinkable, which meant that he could help keep a ship he is on from blowing up due to hull damage.

The human marine had a better chance succeeding in combat oriented tasks because of being human (humans are generally better at doing whatever tasks are in their profession). His character ability was Missile Specialist, which allowed him to fire an extra missile from a missile bay.

The crew, plus their trusty science bot, were ordered to destroy a pirate base. The pirates had kidnapped a prominent UREF scientist. The scientist had been recently cloned, so destroying the base would activate his clone and remove his knowledge from the pirates' hands.

The pirates had picked an uninhabited planet for their base, and erected a planetary force shield around it. The UREF staged a diversionary attack to draw off the majority of the defending ships, leaving our intrepid crew to sneak in and destroy the base.

They warped into the system a fair distance from the planet. The pilot elected to keep the ship's speed low, which turned out to be a mistake. A low speed meant it took longer to get to the planet, which gave the defenders more time to shoot at the ship (and made it easier for missiles to hit).

The defenders were a starbase and a ship of the same size as the crew's ship, both in orbit around the planet. The starbase and the enemy ship both launched missiles as the heroes approached the planet. The enemy ship also broke orbit and met the heroes halfway.

By the halfway point, the heroes were in poor shape. Their ship had been heavily damaged by the incoming missiles, despite the science bot ECMing one, the marine shooting at others, and anti-missile missiles being fired. There's a limit to how much one marine and a science bot can do.

With two out of three engines down, the engineer is furiously running through the ship trying to repair the engines. It's at that point that he discovered the disadvantage of a Fungaloid engineer on a human scoutship. It's a long run from engine to engine.

One of the missiles is a boarding missile, and two enemy marines pop up in the middle engine module. One of them heads for the life support module and sabotages it. The other takes out our marine in the cannon module next door. The engineer gets hit by a shot, but ignores it, trusting to his Fungaloid regeneration to carry him through.

At this point, things are looking bleak, but our pilot uses an inspired bit of Diplomacy to break the morale of one of the enemy marines (taking the tactic of, "You're stuck on a ship with no life support, what are you going to do next?"). That marine heads for the missile bay to shoot himself back to his ship in a boarding missile. The engineer, having fixed the life support, also takes care of the other enemy marine.

The ship is enemy free, but still in a bad situation. The enemy ship is now close enough to touch, and the heroes are looking at having to survive the point blank cannon and missile shots.

Our pilot is again inspired (or demented), and rams the enemy ship. Surprisingly, this works very well. Both ships take about an equal amount of hull damage, but in the resulting confusion, our ship ends up directly behind the enemy ship. They cannot bring their cannon to bear on us.

Our marine, healed by the ever faithful science bot, starts shooting up the enemy ship, damaging their missile bay. Now without any effective offense, the enemy ship runs for it.

The heroes insert their ship into orbit around the planet, being sure to keep the planet between them and the enemy starbase. The marine starts to hammer on the planetary shield with the cannons, and continuing to fire missiles at the fleeing ship. One of those missiles finally does the job, exploding the enemy ship just moments before they would be able to jump to hyperspace.

The planetary shield finally collapses, and the marine fires one of 6 nuclear missiles at the pirate base. Their fortifications stand up to the blast, and the marine readies the next.

At that moment, an enemy dreadnought appears in the outer reaches of the system, and fires a swarm of missiles at the heroes. Our pilot breaks orbit and starts to head away, while the marine fires one last nuclear missile at the pirate base. A direct hit destroys the base!

There's a tense run to the hyperspace limit, with many missiles following, but the trusty science bot programs the hyperdrive in the nick of time and the ship jumps to safety.

Everyone had a great time, and there were some lessons learned about playing the game.

One lesson was that a ship should be moving quickly unless you have a strong need for it to slow down. Many of the missile hits early on could have been avoided had the ship been moving far more quickly than it was.

Another lesson was that having one character with the Unsinkable special ability is very useful. The ship had taken so much hull damage by the end that the engineer burned through all the points in his Unsinkable ability, and all his luck, to keep the ship from blowing up.

The Missile Specialist special ability turned out to be a mistake, as it needed higher combat scores to take advantage of. A good ability for higher level characters, but not for a starting character.

The pilot's Hot Dog special ability was useful early on, but late in the game he almost blew the ship up himself trying to dodge a missile. He ended up doing more hull damage through a Hot Dog maneuver than the missile would have done. And the missile was still there, waiting to hit the next phase.

Despite all that, the crew succeeded and everyone lived. The crew all went up a rank, which means they'll get another character ability and be that much more effective for the next mission.

On the GM side, I'd created a spreadsheet that listed possible actions for each skill type, with notes on using those actions. Having that to refer to helped a lot (we were using all the expansion books, so there were a lot of possible actions characters could take).

I also use the ship builder program available at the Battlestations web site to print out ship control sheets for the enemy ships. The control sheets include the plan of the ship and the power levels, OOC, etc. Very handy!

There were times during the game when I felt like I couldn't find a particular rule I needed to know. So I just made something up, and checked the rule after the game when I had time. Keeping the game moving from phase to phase is important for keeping the players interested.

We all had a great time with our first session, and I'm excited about trying it again!