Scoring Rogue stars

Having covered my favourite game in Chain of command and it's twin brother from another mother that needs guidance to not chew live wires, Bolt action where to go next?

How about "the only place not corrupted by capitalism; spaaaace!"

Rogue stars is one of the earlier Osprey "Blue border" books (officially titled the Osprey wargames series), a range I understand to be designed to be cheap and self contained. I own most of these books and I think almost all of them have been worth the gamble but this one in particular is a favorite in the series, no small feat when the series contains the various "Rampant" games and Gaslands. "But why?" I hear you cry! Well;

Presentation  6

The Ospreys have a fairly uniform look so they'll generally all land around the same mark but Rogue stars has some artwork that appeals to me and the model pictures throughout are all painted by Kev Dallimore so are a high quality. The rules are explained well enough but sections are arranged in such a way that there will be a lot of flicking back and forth even when you can remember where to look. Rather importantly though everything you need is in there. Somewhere.

As in all the "Blue books" there's no index and this one could really have done with one. It can be like trying to find somewhere in Redditch without a map. Seriously, those roads don't lead to the same place twice!

Playability  8

This is what *I* think people mean when they talk about a skirmish game - 4 to 6 models per side, hit locations, and lots of individual details. Some of my other favourite "skirmish" games are up around 60 models per side but they're based on battles that featured thousands of men per side so in relative scale they still are a skirmish but, just between you and me, this is the real skirmish stuff.

As a consequence of having potentially 6 characters, all with unique weapons, armour, skills and traits there can be a lot to learn and remember. Add to that tracking all those individual statuses can mean quite a few tokens on the table at any given time plus a long crew sheet.

The other side of this is that you can potentially have 6 characters, all with unique weapons, armour, skills and traits and be able to track their individual statuses. Given how messy this COULD get I've never found it to actually be a problem as most tokens are removed from play every time the initiative swaps sides and the more tokens the active side has the more likely that is to happen. It's like a built in valve to release pressure when the tokens approach critical mass which is a clever bit of design.

The scenarios section has three tables to roll on to create some randomly generated missions with interesting wrinkles to them, which is great! Unfortunately they lack some specifics about exactly how to enact some parts. "Minor" things like where do the attackers deploy? Can defender placed objectives be put anywhere or do they have to be within/outside of a particular distance of the enemy or a board edge? It can all be sorted with a brief chat between players and a sporting mindset but I do still think it's the book's biggest flaw.

Mechanics  9

The game is not the first of it's line. It's from the "A song of..." series that's been running for a good while now. I'm not very familiar with the other games but I've heard enough to know that the core mechanics are from the same roots and presumably as a result of this experience it all clicks here.

It's a D20 game, and as a very infrequent D&D player I quite enjoy being able to roll my chunky dice. I don't enjoy the 1s I roll so much but there we are. 

Most things you roll on have critical failure or success results when you roll a 1 or 20 and your stress, pin and wound markers all affect different rolls in slightly different combinations so there can be a lot to remember. It's hardly an excessive amount though and never stopped me getting into the flow of things. I think it's worth saying I played most (if not all) my games of Rogue stars with my wife who hasn't played a lot of wargames and despite her limited experience she had no problems getting the hang of this. And she routinely crushed my crew. I still think about the game where she blasted three of my four crew with headshots in consecutive reaction fire from her weakest alien caterpillar... thing. Sometimes the dice just love/hate you.

The activation mechanic is a great one. You chose a character and one, two or three dice to roll. Each success lets you perform one action but each failure lets an enemy make a reaction roll first and the more things you've done in the turn the harder it is to keep activating. Unless you're my wife, then apparently it's dead easy.

Shooting doesn't restrict you to a frustratingly short range either which I really appreciate. Instead it gives you a base range of 8 inches and adding a negative for every additional 4 inches after (or 2 inches for short range weapons). Both shooting and melee are pretty simple to work out but do have a list of modifiers which in my experience were the things I had to reference the most. For all the things you can do though I can only consider it "totally werf". The book packs a LOT into it's page count, a good chunk of which I haven't really touched on.

Flavour 9

This is hard to quantify. It's not really got a single setting beyond "science fiction underworld" and wants you to fill in the details with what you want it to be. There are crew creation guidelines for themes and tactical disciplines which you can use to get a good bit of flavour and the character creation options give you a lot of potential. If you wanted to play a game set in the 40k universe for example you probably can't quite make suitable space Marines (at least if you follow the creation rules) but you could easily make some guardsmen and alien cultists. Similarly Star wars jedi would be a difficult to get right but rebels and Stormtroopers are a natural fit. And of course there's the generic sci fi setting that's in your mind right now. You know the one, yeah, that's it. With all the neon and the dust and that woman with the notable features. That one works too.

I've tried crews ranging from a space version of the A-Team featuring an cyborg and a humanoid cat to faceless fascist space police. It's a really great game for finding a home for those miscellaneous models you have at the bottom of a box in the cupboard

If you want a kick start on the type of peoples that could populate your universe the book includes ready made character profiles for the models available from North star miniatures that were made for the game which is very handy. They also make for good drop in "celebrities".

Ultimately for the guidance the book gives without overly limiting you I'm going to give it a high score. 

Support  3

Here's where things faceplant a bit. On the Osprey wargames resources page you can get an errata, a blank crew roster, an example crew roster and (cue the angels singing) a QRS! That alone is almost worth it's support points even if it probably should have been in the book. Still, "Better late than before your chickens hatch" as that bloke in the park used to say. Wise man...

The bad news is those files and a Facebook group is everything I know of for the game. 

The good news is that the FB group has Andrea Sfiligoi (the author) in it and includes files of additional ideas for weapons, kit, themes and a quite detailed one on expanding the grenade rules.

As I mentioned earlier this game is part of a family of games and so it does seem possible to take some ideas from the earlier ones and hammer them into shape for Rogue stars.

I've also been able to limit some options and write a few new traits, weapons and armour to allow for some 20th century gaming in the style of "Dad's army" and "Allo allo". Yes, I am old. Apparently.

Despite those last two points they aren't really things I can class as proper game support. Well, perhaps my ideas as that would be effectively community support... No, that will just muddy the waters. 3. I'm scoring it a 3.

TOTAL  78

In the end it's a higher score than I expected but one that's very well earned and an easy recommendation from me.