Wargame Night 01-14

On January 12th, a couple of us guys got together for the 2014 inaugural Kriegspiel Tournament game of Twilight Imperium. We decided to enlist Luke, the Yoda-like character in the foreground of the picture, to play as the fourth alien race in TI3. The following races were randomly chosen:

Bob -  The Winnu
Ross - Barony of Letnev
Luke - Ghosts of Creuss
Bruce - Universities of Jol-Nar

 I believe we decided to forgo domain counters this night and proceeded to construct the map forthwith. As the benevolent Universities of Jol-Nar I decided to reach out to Mecatol Rex and sent a delegation - with lots of military hardware- to show them our "credentials". It was unpleasant but the natives soon learned to love us. Now all I had to do was wait for the public objective cards to just shower me with points for holding Mecatol.

In the meantime, Luke meekly moved forward from his wormhole base and was content on being pacific in an otherwise turbulent sea of move and countermove that is TI3. Soon even he bailed on us and it was left to Bob, Ross and myself to determine who would rule the galaxy.

That is when, right on cue, Chaos Monkey decided to pay a visit to Mecatol Rex and take was rightly mine.

He attacked me outright and destroyed my fleet and then proceeded to make a planetary invasion against my army based on the surface including my mech units that I wisely stationed only recently. He too brought mech units and the battle was fierce and bloody. It came down to just one damaged mech unit for each side and with merely one die roll away from complete loss of Mecatol, I was able to destroy his last rusty and burning tank. It was a hard won victory but could have gone either way. Nevertheless, I followed up immediately afterward with a counter invasion and destroyed his fleet and reinforced my troops on Mecatol.

While all of this was going, Bob was slowly building up victory points and in the end he was able to secure first place. Unfortunately, even with my Pyrrhic victory on Mecatol, I was not able to secure the second place finish which instead went to Ross. I had to settle with third place. Most unfortunate.

It was still a fun game but was disappointed that Bob was able to finish so strong in first place. I'm sure he was happy that me and the monkey were duking it out on MR but alas, I lost in the end and nearly wept. Where is Eric when I need him?