Space Weirdos – The Hunt for Genuine Pork

With all the adult-life drama, it is hard to find a moment of respite. And with current events being very depressing, the need for escapism is even more pressing.
Consequently, on a mediocre warm Saturday afternoon, we turned to our favourite beer and bretzel game: Space Weirdos. For this scenario, we decided to dust off our small warbands, Eric’s Max Power and his crew and my Human Preservation Society, and pit them into a homebrew scenario.

The Story Begins…

Tropico 4A, a habitable moon orbiting Tropico 4 in the Tropico system. The moon itself is of no strategic value, except for its one resource, a resource that is harvested from the very sand of the moon: genuine Pork.
A staple in the households of the human sphere, genuine pork is gained through a complex mining and refining process from the minerals and microbial life forms in the sand of Tropico 4A.
As companies vie for control over this essential resource, bands of mercenaries are often sent by Big Agro-alimentary to disrupt the operations of their competitors.
In a bizarre turn of events, two different mercenary bands, Max Power’s bounty hunters and the Human Preservation Society (HPS), try to seize control of an independent genuine pork plant.

Set-up and Objectives

For this homebrew scenario we set up the board in our usual fashion: we dump as much terrain on it as it makes sense, stand back, and declare it to be fair and balanced.

We decided to go for an objective and point-based game, instead of the classical kill ‘em all. While murdering each other with extreme prejudice sounds fun, it often leads to one-sided action. Consequently we agreed on three objectives with different point values:

• Capturing and securing the chief engineer (hidden in a portapotty): 2 pts. The chief engineer would become a temporary warband member for the Space Weirdos claiming him (all stats D4).
• Blowing up the main storage in the centre of the board: 3 pts. One action to rig it; one full turn of dramatic tension before it detonates and distributes AoE blast damage in the generous spirit of the Space Weirdos rules.
• Claiming a barrel of refined genuine Pork: 1 pt.

Early Game and the Joy of Teleporting

The game began by handing Eric the initiative; by alternating activations we brought our Space Weirdos closer to the objectives. Having Weirdos with the Teleport special rule in both warbands allowed both parties to swiftly claim key positions and secure some of the objectives.

Trevor, the green bounty hunter bot of the HPS, made his mark by teleporting to the portapotty and claiming the chief engineer early in the game. In the process he claimed FIRST BLOOD by taking out Ra, one of Eric’s Space Weirdos, who tried to intercept the green robot.

But despite his early success, Trevor was exposed and could not get away fast enough; mainly because Eric’s Sniper, Zort, similarly disregarded the laws of physics and teleported in the midgame to a secure elevated position, holding Trevor under fire.

Meanwhile the HPS monowheeled Medboy swiftly approached the barrel of genuine Pork, using extra speed.

Elsewhere, the area around the red tanks in the HPS part of the board soon became one of pleasant carnage, as sleek assassins and clumsy brawler robots tried to kill each other.

Midgame

The midgame was, in the grand tradition of midgames, a period of consolidation, repositioning, and quietly terrible decisions. Eric brought his Space Weirdos closer to the big prize: the main storage container. And despite all of the HPS’s efforts (mainly KAB-00-M), Marl Boro began to rig it for an explosion, i.e. prepping a grenade.

Gor-1-LA, for the HPS, managed to secure the red tanks by driving off Eric’s Sniper, Zort; a very tactically sound action, despite the fact that the latter retreated to yet another elevated position on the far side of the board. Due to their Cloak skill, the HPS could not take out Zort the sniper, and the robot bounty hunters mostly dodged for cover as we approached the endgame.

Endgame

Turn 4 arrived with a firework as the main storage container was successfully blown up by Marl Boro (using the aforementionned grenade), awarding Eric 3 pts and, as a bonus, knocking down the HPS’s heavy damage dealer, KAB-00-M. The irony of his name is not lost on me.

Max Power, a man acting as his name dictates, was wreaking havoc around the portapotty and tried at one point to kill the chief engineer, thus depriving the HPS and everyone else of those victory points.

He would later succeed, thus causing a big gap in the galaxy’s genuine pork supply chain.

The remainder of my warband, caught between Eric’s positioning and an extended streak of unfortunate dice rolls, were either suppressed or removed from the field. After turn 4, we agreed to roll for a fifth turn on a 4+.

The dice, apparently sharing Eric’s sense of narrative closure, obliged.

Final score:

• Eric: 3
• Myself: 1 (the barrel, retrieved with the quiet dignity of a man who has accepted his situation)
• Neither of us claimed the points for the chief engineer, for obvious reasons of being dead.

Final Thoughts

Space Weirdos is for obvious reasons one of our favourite casual skirmish games. One of its major strengths is the randomness of events (especially the results of combat and shooting) as well as the simplicity of its special rules.

This game was defined by two special rules, which were (ab)used abundantly: Teleport and Cloak. Teleport allowed both our warbands to ignore the boring part known as “walking” and to secure key positions and objectives. Cloak was extra handy, especially for the snipers who, with the clever use of shooting reactions, could take cover in most of the terrain.

In hindsight, our point system was suboptimal. Three objectives, maximum 6 points, with one worth half the total. The maths was always going to produce a decisive result rather than a tense one. Future scenarios of this type would benefit from kill points or board control to spread the scoring more evenly and keep both players engaged into the final turn.

As usual, this game was fuelled by good humour, snacks, and fine alcoholic beverages, which resulted in an entertaining and greatly distracting afternoon.