The First Antares Exploration.

Greetings.

The Bob and I got together to finally play through Beyond the Gates of Antares and it only took two years from when I got the starter set to get minis onto a table! We just basically ran with the stuff from the starter, no lists or anything pre-planned, and simply tried to kill each other. Seemed like a good enough reason if any to test out the mechanics of a game. We roped in Jim and Chyanne and got them to play a bit with some Concord units.

"I hear them coming!"

It has been a very long time since I played a unit-based 40k game with range modifiers and specific weapon settings. Probably not since 40k 2nd Edition ('97?) so I found this to be refreshingly old school. The weapon mecjanics are all very interesting and fairly easy to grasp. The d10 system works very well for this system and gives BtGoA a level of detail and weapon/armor diversity that 40k simply lacks these days.

Cover and high ground.

Close Combat was so incredibly easy that it took us a while to figure out if we were doing it right. In the end, we found it to be refreshingly simple and fun.

Especially for the Ghar.

I learned the hard way that close combat with the Ghar battlesuits is a situation best avoided. At the start of close combat both sides get to shoot each at each other Point Blank! An idea I wished 40k had embraced to better effect, especially in the editions without Overwatch. The Ghar disruptors are particularly brutal and we saw a few Concord models die in the Point Blank firefight. Those Ghar suits are tough, and their disruptors are nasty! The additional hits and armor modifiers are quite efficient at cutting down the Concord.

The final stand-off

 But the Concord have numeric superiority and already I see that the key to overcoming the tough Ghar armor is have lots of aimed shots. In the end we had only one Ghar left alive but it was more than capable of continuing to ruin Concord lives if we hadn't chose to stop at the end of Round 6. We all agreed that it was a fun game and quite easy once you figured out the mechanics. A bit of "unlearning what you know" in regards to other games like this helps; sort of like changing editions of a game in that sense.

So yeah, we had fun and we are looking forward to doing more!

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