AAR: The Scarab Plague of Mars!

   As usual, this AAR is short on photos because I was too busy playing to take pictures. However, I did grab a few of the setup. Game was played on 28 JUN 2019 in my gameroom with Zach, his son Nathaniel, and myself participating.

SCENARIO:

   Two rival companies of adventurers, the British Lord Curr's Incorrigibles and the German Empire's Society of Thule have traveled to Mars via aethership. Their goal: seize ancient Martian relics of occult power. Unfortunately, they were discovered and Martian priests have awakened a terrible curse: a massive swarm of flesh-eating scarabs. The scarabs will eat only Earthling flesh, though. So now, the two companies must flee for their lives. Safety lies on the canal running through the nearest village, Golah. The Earthlings want to get on the boats; the Martians want to stop them long enough for the scarabs to catch them and devour them all.

RULES AND FIGURES:

   The rules used were In Her Majesty's Name, my favorite for small skirmish Victorian Science Fiction. The figures are a mixture of North Star (the Society of Thule and Lord Curr's Incorrigibles), Parroom Station (The Masked One, Martian leader and mystic), and RAFM (High Martians, Shield Gunners, and Archers).

An overview of the battlefield.

The mat is from Cigar Box. First time used!

The Village of Golah

Buildings are Plastruct COLORed buildings for SAGA

Custom made canals, ordered a decade ago, only second time used in a game.

Boats are all scratchbuilt and older, too.

British Start point. The Society of Thule is on the other side of the ridge.

The small dots at table edge are the scarabs, advancing as a line.

A Martian Shield Gunner stands guard outside the canal master's office.

The Masked One, a Martian Mystic

High Martian warrior. Savage flying primitives.

   The two companies moved up as quickly as possible but got held up in and around the village. If the random rolls for the scarabs' advance hadn't been very low, all would have been devoured! As it is, the two European teams ganged up on the outgunned Martians and killed all but two of them (the Masked One, who used his Mystic powers to slow up the British advance, and one shield gunner, saved by his heavy armour).

   In the end, the British reached the boats first. Rather than allow the Germans to escape, the British took all of the boats. End result: British victory (44 points, almost all of his company escaped), followed by the Martians (28 points, all because of devoured Europeans) and then the Germans (19 points, for killing Martians). But we all had fun, and that was the main point after all.

   Notes for next time we run this scenario: 

• Martians need more points to offset European gangup.
• Scarabs need to move a flat d10", not d10-2. For four turns in a row, the scarabs did not move at all. This cuts the pressure on the Europeans to get moving!