tarship battles have always been one of the signature elements of J. Michael Straczynski's Babylon 5. The epic fights, involving multiple capital ships exchanging volleys of hellfire against one another and smaller fighters dodging between them, stood in sharp contrast to the more ponderous, slow-moving duels seen on Star Trek at the time.
A Call to Arms, Mongoose Publishing's new Babylon 5 tabletop starship combat game, seeks to capture the action, drama and vigor of these space-borne fights. The game ships as a box set, with a 48-page core rule book, a 96-page "fleet" book and more than 100 cardboard counters representing ships and fighters. There are no maps included; the game can be played on any tabletop.
The game is played at one of five different scales, ranging from small to huge: patrol, skirmish, raid, battle and war. Players choose which scale they want to use, and then have five points with which to buy ships. Each ship that corresponds to the chosen scale costs one point, but players can choose ships from higher and lower scales, with corresponding increases and decreases in ship cost.
The "Fleet" book contains stats for ships from the four principal races—Human, Narn, Centuri and Minbari—as well the Shadows, the Vorlons, the League of Non-Aligned Worlds and the fledgling Interstellar Alliance. Each ship is defined by a dozen or so statistics, including its speed, the number of turns it can make in a round, how strong its hull is, how much damage it can take, how many crew it carries, what weapons it carries and what special rules apply to it.
Battles are straightforward affairs that are divided into turns, each of which is further broken into three phases. The first is the movement phase, during which players are allowed to maneuver their ships and issue special orders. These orders allow ships to perform exceptional actions, such as increasing their speed or bracing for an attack. The attack phase follows, which is when the actual fighting occurs. Each weapon in the game has a certain number of "attack dice" associated with it. Players roll as many six-sided die as the weapon has attack dice, with each die roll trying to score higher than the enemy's hull value. After each hit, there's another roll to determine whether the blast was absorbed by a bulkhead, damaged the ship or struck some critical system. The short end phase allows players to repair damaged critical systems.
Victory conditions vary. In a simple fight, it's whoever destroys all of his opponents. there are also scenarios—like "ambush" and "assassination"—for which special victory conditions apply. The game is designed for two players, but there are optional rules for multiplayer games.
Short and brutal space battles
Babylon 5's space battles are usually short and brutal affairs, with ships closing to attack range, exchanging fire and—if they're unlucky—exploding catastrophically. A Call to Arms does a good job of translating these battles into game format, primarily through fast-moving, easy-to-understand rules that retain just enough complexity to keep things interesting.
The game's "special orders" are a big part of the secret of its success. Commands like "Close Blast Doors and Activate Defense Grid" (which prepares a ship for attack) bring Babylon 5's dramatic flavor to the game. So do the rules for critical hits, which can target systems such as engines, reactors and weapons, and whose effects can be nothing short of catastrophic.
Although A Call to Arms is a miniatures-based game, it has as an advantage over competitors like Games Workshop's Battlefleet Gothic in that minis aren't required to play the game. The flat cardboard cutouts of ships included with the box set are enough to run almost every fleet engagement players can imagine. This should be a welcome relief to anyone less than thrilled with the idea of spending money and time amassing a fleet, though if others want to do that, Mongoose is happy to oblige: They already sell Earth fleet miniatures and plan to release sets for other races as well.
A nice, but underused, hook for the game is its tie-ins to Mongoose's Babylon 5 Role-Playing Game. Unfortunately, the box set comes with a scant two pages of content in support of the RPG, with most of that given over to adapting its rules to the miniatures game. It would have been nice to see more pages dedicated to this subject, particularly if it included new prestige classes, feats and skills.
Materials-wise, the game doesn't need a map, but it would have been nice if they'd included one as a backdrop. Another worthwhile addition would have been space objects—asteroids, dust clouds, planets, etc.—that come into play in the game. While players can improvise these objects, it's always nice to have something more professional-looking. A cheat sheet, listing turn order and many of the game's tables, would also have been helpful. The game's counters look good and work well when playing the game, but a few—particularly the Narn ships—can be hard to read. They can also be difficult to keep track of when fighting with several identical ships; on-card numbering would have been useful.
These are minor quibbles, however. All in all, A Call to Arms is a quick, fun and, most importantly, loyal interpretation of Babylon 5's epic space battles.
I like miniatures games, but unfortunately I never have the time—or the money—to invest in them. Call to Arms nicely avoids that problem by providing me with the cardboard counters and my miniatures-loving friends with fleets they can purchase.
— Ken
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