So it had been a while since I'd dragged Forbidden Stars onto the table. This weekend my regular gaming buddies were out of town and I was in a 40K mood, so I thought I'd have a crack at running through a game of Forbidden Stars.
I don't pretend this is anything approaching a perfect template for solo play, but I thought I'd share.
I set up for two players - Marines vs. Orks. I ran the Marines and the improvised blind play for the Orks was as follows:
- For orders tokens I shuffled them face down and placed two tokens in sectors where orders were most beneficial. When it was the Orks turn I revealed both tokens and selected the one most beneficial/logical for the Orks.
- For combat cards I shuffled the deck and then dealt out three piles of two cards each, one pile for each round of combat. Regardless of whether I was attacking or defending I would choose the Marine combat card first and then reveal the two Ork cards and choose the one that was of greatest benefit to the Orks/mess with my plans the most.
Warp storms caused quite a lot of havoc! At first helping the Marines by cutting off Ork reinforcements and then two Battle Cruisers got cut off and annihilated. Towards the end of the game the warp storms totally cut off the Ork end of the board. Which allowed a build up unmolested, but it also meant some key outpost planets were overrun. There was a long run of turns where neither of the warp storms moved due to the options on the event cards drawn.
Planet locations made the Ork Roks Advance Order upgrade very useful for them; however, the lack of investment in ships early cost them dearly as the Marines were able to throw down quite a few unmolested Orbital Bombardments (with the order upgrade too!).
Far from perfect, but made for an entertaining few hours of gaming.
In hindsight I think the second objective placement (in the end board next to the home planets) made thing less interesting. Next I plan to have a crack at the Eldar vs. their nemesis - Chaos, as I'm yet to get the Eldar on the board.