Stars & Lasers - A Deceptively Simple but Incredibly Fun Take on Sci-Fi Space Combat

After a hectic two weeks painting two separate 6mm Cold War forces and a Saga Warband it felt like a well-deserved break to sit down for a game of Stars & Lasers last week with Mac from the South London Warlords.

I immediately felt strangely at home with S&L. Although the setting was different the ship cards with various ship stats, weapons and spaces for hit points strangely reminded me of Victory at Sea, the WW2 naval combat game that first got me into wargaming about 6 years ago at the Uni of Sheffield wargames society.

My fleet for the game, provided and beautifully painted by Mac

Mac explained everything on these cards in a couple of minutes and it all seemed pretty intuitive. That for me was the predominant experience of playing the game. Admittedly we were playing with fleets that didn't feature any of the ruleset's more exotic features like carriers that could deploy fighters, or turrets with heavy weapons that caused different effects but Mac explained the core rules to me over the course of the first turn and I played through much of the rest of the game without needing too much more help.

My frigates launches a missile at one of Mac's scouting corvettes.

Activation was random which added some nice tension to proceedings.

Shooting  with lasers revolved around a mechanic I'd not really encountered before where you measured the range to target then had to roll higher than that value on a d20. With many ships having more weapons than shields this made close ranged combat remarkably deadly with even the heaviest battleships being in danger of being crippled or knocked out in a single unlucky turn. Firing missiles involved deploying a marker for your salvo which either hit its target immediately or moved in a straight line every turn until it impacted something, was shot down or flew off into space never to be seen again. I have a feeling that, if I ever take this game to Sheffield, it's a mechanic Sam will love as he's been testing a similar one for the torpedoes in his own variant of Victory at Sea.

Movement was equally simple. Ships moved up to their speed in inches and could make any number of turns which cost them 2 inches of movement and was performed by using a custom tool that was once again incredibly intuitive. One thing I did come to realise was that ships in this game can really get a move on. Enemy ships that seemed like they were far away were suddenly up close and personal a turn later, others that appeared to have overshot their target and were heading out of the fight were quickly turned around and back in the action.

So what happened in my first game? After losing a ship pretty early on and sending one of my tiny corvettes to play a game of chicken with one of Mac's larger frigates (continuing the ramming tactic that won me my first game of Star Wars Armada) a fairly chaotic long range skirmish broke out. Mac's fleet became split up with his capital ship on one side of the large warp gate at the centre of the table and most of his other ships on the far side. I saw my opportunity and went in for the kill.

My capital ship lines up a devastating blow on Mac's battleship.

Both our battleships had had their shields worn away the previous turn and failed to get them back online. Taking the first activation I took the opportunity to get in the first hit before putting some distance between us. I failed to achieve a kill but Mac's ship was taken down to only 2 hit points.

Mac returned fire and while my flagship was left in a bad way I was confident I could keep it in the fight. I was pretty sure I had this game in the bag. However, the one mechanic I'd been desperate to see, due to its key role in my games of Victory at Sea, suddenly reared its head: critical hits. Mac had scored 2 of them and rolled d20s to see what effect they had. He rolled a 2 and a 17. Consulting the table we found that he'd damaged my engines with the first hit. I wasn't too worried. With the second he'd damaged my engines again. Surely not a problem.

But a problem it was for the rules went on to explain that as I'd not repaired the first critical damage on my engines the second hit caused them to catastrophically explode, destroying my ship and sending out a shock wave and debris which also crippled the rest of my fleet that had been clustered around the unlucky ship as it went supernova. I couldn't find it in myself to be annoyed as this was exactly what I'd been hoping for from a critical hit system: something cinematic.

The remaining ships fight for survival.

In any case I got my revenge and finally destroyed Mac's flagship in retaliation with my next activation. The rest of the game was characterised by tense dogfights between our remaining lighter craft, almost all having lost their shields, missiles and most of their hull points. A highlight for me came when one of my frigates managed to kill Mac's heaviest remaining ship (a light cruiser) and a corvette in the same activation.

But by the final turn it looked like it might be a Pyrrhic victory for Mac or at best a draw. He had a lone frigate left while I had a frigate and a corvette but both essentially crippled and one volley from death and Mac's ship looking like it had more shields and hit points than I could ever hope to get through in one turn. But the eternal spirit of the Hammerhead corvettes from Armada flowed through me and I realised I'd forgotten my trustiest of tactics: ramming. Ploughing my frigate into the side of Mac's ship while firing away with all my lasers I managed to cause enough damage to put it down to 2 hull points. By pure luck I also got second activation and managed to swing my corvette round, Tokyo drift style, to finish him off with my 2 front lasers.

All in all Stars & Lasers proved to be the endearingly simple and addictively fun sci-fi space combat game I never knew I wanted. Its definitely gone in fairly high on my wargames shopping list and it feels like something the Sheffield group could easily get into.

Many thanks to Mac for running a great intro game with lots of helpful and patient assistance (much of my last turn was orchestrated by him) and if you're interested in Mac's rules they're available on Wargames Vault along with a sizeable number of supplements covering everything from Pirates to Biological alien craft:
https://www.wargamevault.com/product/210571/Stars--Lasers