My first experience with SST was reading the book back in the mid-90s. A friend wanted me to play a sci-fi wargame in the grim future and said that to get the proper idea about marine armor I needed to read this book. He also told me about a great boardgame (using chits) of SST and how much fun it was. We never got around to playing that one; I wish we had.
Not long after that we went to the San Diego Comic-con and sat in the (massive) audience for the preview of the first SST movie. Caspar Van Dien was there along with the actress playing Dizzy, the director, etc. When it came out, the movie was entertaining. Nowhere near the best sci-fi movie ever, but fun.
I never knew about the CGI cartoon, so when I heard that the SST wargame was in development and saw some of the first images they were working from, I couldn't figure it out. This didn't look like the movie or how I'd envisioned the armor from the books. Huh. Guess there was some kind of cartoon. Oh well.
Kublacon rolls around in the spring of '05 and Andy Chambers is there demoing the game. There was a pretty big crowd hanging around. About 20 people getting ready to throw some dice on the big table. A second table was nearby for smaller games. I didn't want to get involved in a big game at the time, but I did chat with Andy about the game mechanics for 5-10 minutes and it sounded pretty cool.
Flash-forward to winter '06 and I pick up a copy of the game at a convention for a great price. I've got a friend who's in the Mongoose demo program, so I ask him to teach me the game. We play a couple small demos and I like the system. I start building up a Bug army for the Kublacon '06 SST tourney. I spend many late nights assembling and painting a plasma bug, tanker and brain bug. I don't have time to assemble and paint all the warrior bugs I'll need, so I'll be borrowing those from my friend.
Kublacon '06 finally arrives and I'm ready for battle. Matt Sprange is one of the guests of honor at the con. Prior to the tournament, there are many demos being conducted by Kirkmex, he's got a nice display with lots of the minis and big signs. He runs a big game on Saturday night and this time, I'm ready to play. He's painted *all* the miniatures on the battlefield, which was 12' by 4', also constructed and painted by Kirkmex. I think there were 300 warrior bugs, 3 Plasma bugs, 2 tankers, at least one brain bug and a whole bunch of LAMI. 40? 50? Not sure.
To get the game started, Mobile Infantry Lieutenant Jason (can't remember his forum name) in full costume got the crowd going with the, "Do you want to live forever!?!" stuff. He did a great job at it:
And the big game was underway:
The objective had something to do with killing or capturing the Brain Bug in the middle of the table. Those LAMI there *nearly* did the job. There were also some Fighters flying overhead, but I think they got taken out by the Plasma Bugs. A Skyhook was going to land and capture the Brain Bug, I think, but iirc, the Bugs were finally able to swarm in at the last moment and take out the LAMI. Don't hold me to that result as it was nearly 2 years ago now.
Okay, so after a GREAT game (thanks Kirkmex!!!), it was time to rest up for the tourney the next day. I won't bore you with how my games went, but here's my favorite photoshopped game in progress. This is after Turn 2, I believe:
I got SO slaughtered by that guy's Exosuits. This was my first "real" game of SST with full-sized armies, so I had a serious disadvantage and my opponent really knew what he was doing. I caused very few casualties that game. We had 8 players? Maybe 10? The MI armies were all remarkably varied. There was this Exosuit army, a Marauder army, a Pathfinder army, a standard MI army. I played against another Bug army that looked similar to mine but had many key differences. All in all, I had a good time getting stomped on throughout the day. Matt Sprange watched my last game and said, "Come and find me after your game and I'll give you some advice." I did so and we chatted for a half-hour or more and he did indeed have some good advice for me.
Later that night, Matt did a slide-show presentation about the future of Mongoose, with Victory at Sea being an upcoming game at the time, among other things. This was also the first time "pre-painted" came up as a topic. At the time he was talking about it terms of a Warhammer-style game where you would buy blocks of units in a box, pre-painted. He did mention the quality of pre-paints would be higher than what we'd seen in the industry before. No mention of Battlefield Evolution or any major changes to SST came up during the talk.
I had a good time and was looking forward to more SST games in the future. Unfortunately, my friend stopped being an MI volunteer shortly after Kublacon, which was a bummer as he was my prime candidate for SST games. Later that year my FLGS closed down and one of my best "gamer friends" moved away, putting a few more obstacles in my SST path, and then of course the SST EVO stuff was announced and the game went into deep freeze.
Present Day:
At this point, my interest in the game is rising. It looks like it will be extremely hard to get ahold of SST minis from here on out, so I've been filling the gaps in my MI army (the bugs are in good enough shape at this point) so that I'll have two armies to share with friends and get some games in. I only regret not buying the Exosuits when they were readily available. D'oh!
I look forward to downloading SST WotS, printing it out at Kinko's and giving it a spin.
I've got my fingers crossed for Mongoose as I hate to see companies in the gaming industry on hard times. Hopefully they'll be able to pull through and if they're able to revive the SST game down the road, then great!
Thanks for reading. And thanks for the other posts in this thread.
