This is Not a Test - Cold Vengence

Our occasional campaign of This is Not a Test hotted up this week as Jim, Andrew and I came together for a three-way game of Cold Vengance. The rules were clear - victory points for taking opponents out of action, more for taking out a leader, and a penalty for being the first player to fire a shot.

As can be seen in the photo above, Jim's mutants came on from the (my) left, Andrew's mutants were at the top right, and my beloved (and miserably ill-efficient) halfling peacekeepers were in the bottom right. 

All parties decided to split their focus between the other two players (more fun than two players picking on one) and the game opened with Andrew's flamethrower equipped mutie emerging from a tunnel (discovered following the Snipe Hunt) to grill two of Jim's larger chaps. As the warband firing the first shots, Andrew therefore would suffer -2 victory points, but it was fun, it was cinematic, and it was relatively effective. Between the flamethrower and Andrew's escaped slave psychic, he held up the larger part of Jim's mutants, causing quite a few to flee from critical failures against their morale.

My rangers struggled to get into a position to get their guns to bear. The three snipers finally made it onto a roof by the end of turn three. only to then suffer a psychic barrage as both Jim and Andrew's leaders continued to try to demoralise them for the rest of the engagement. Hotshot managed to get himself taken out of action at one point from Jim's chameleon-like gunner with an LMG, while Doc continued to jam his gun every time he tried to fire...

Down in the alleys, the Flores Minor Ranger Corp went toe-to-toe with Andrew's tough mutants. Only their depend-o-bot, BT29, was tough enough to hold them off. When Demo and Snake Eyes were both taken out by the hugely annoying mutant dog-thing, many of the remaining rangers fled the scene. 

At the end of the day, only Sarge (on his rooftop), and Heavy (taking up a final stand position on the roof of a burnt-out car) were left standing of the halfling rangers. For Jim, his cherubic leader-psychic still remained at large, but everyone else was either downed, grilled, or had fled. Andrew had about half of his crew left, but the victory points did not go to the warband with the most men (and I use 'men' in the loosest possible way) standing. 

The Flores Minor Ranger Corp, rather surprisingly, scraped their first win out of this bloody engagement. I only beat Andrew by a single VP meaning that it was the penalty for the opening shots which cost him his rather more deserved victory.

In the post-match sequence, Jim lost a few of his mutants, failed to tame some young wasteland critters and chose not to engage in a side-hustle as a hired gun for a passing caravan. Andrew failed get into a GOG bunker he discovered, nor past a turret defence, but several of his mutants did get to upgrade their profiles. My rangers found enough barter script to recruit a new ranger with a shotgun (Buckshot), pay for everyone's upkeep, and upgrade BT29 with a large caliber machine-pistol. Four rangers received profile upgrades, but Snake Eyes ended up with a bum leg following the scrap in the alleyway.