A day long first Artemis session in Manchester UK.

Yesterday our little gaming circle (mainly miniatures and RPGs normally) got together for our first try at Artemis. We were one shy of a full crew, so doubled up on Comms & Science.

After I gave everyone a brief overview of the various stations and how they worked, we started slow with a LVL 1 shakedown before ramping the difficulty up to 5. We then rotated through all the stations so that everyone got to try every station as well as a mission as Captain.

After a break for a barbecued dinner we pushed the difficulty up to 9, everyone picked their favourite station and we ran through another invasion and several of the missions that came with the game, culminating in the Trials of Deneb trilogy. We tried out several of the cooler tactics - baiting enemies across minefields, kiting space monsters and the minelaying bombing runs (which we were getting pretty good at towards the end) At the end of the final game we'd lost three of the four stations but somehow managed to take out all the main battlefleets and what we thought were all of the Elites, but since the game didn't end we knew there was one left. Out of torpedoes, nukes and ECMs and low on energy, we limped back to the surviving station only to run out of energy the moment it came into view.... along with the Skaren Executor that was attacking it. Moments later it broke off the attack and came after us. Front shields failing, no energy for warp, we only had two mines left from our attack on the last battlefleet. The engineer cut power from everything except impulse and we limped towards and past the enemy, taking heavy fire as we executed the slowest bombing run in history. Weapons hit the mine release and we slowly limped away. The blast flattened our rear shields and caused massive damage, but it sent that alien swine straight to the Black Fleet where he belonged. It was a perfectly climactic end to the day. (or more accurately, the beginning of the next - we'd played from about 11:30 to 00:45 with about an hour's break in the middle.

Overall everyone had a great time and loved the game. I'm not sure we're going to be playing as a regular crew any time soon - one of us had come over the Pennines from Leeds for the day while another ships out to foreign parts in the service of 'er Majesty next week for six months. But the guy from Leeds was trying to work out if he had the room and PCs to setup a full bridge at his place And I think everyone would be happy to play again next time we can all get together.

Dr V