Thursday is gaming night

Been getting ready for this evening, where with a bit of luck I be running a game of Silent Death for some people.

I picked it up a few weeks back and played a few quick games over at a friends house and was impressed with just how quick it is to sit down and play.

Basically it's a fighter scale starship combat game, and since FFG's X-Wing has been having a lot of traction lately I thought I'd see if anyone was interested in playing down at the local club.

It's a Hex based game that is similar to Battletech and SFB and like that it uses datasheets for individual ships to track damage. Unlike those two, the game actually runs really fast and has a fairly simple turn structure.
One of the things that speeds things up a lot is that the dice used to roll to hit are also used to work out damage.

Say you have a Pulse Laser, to hit you roll 2D8's (this is one of those games where better stuff get's bigger dice, like Force on Force or Tommorows War) plus your Gunnery Skill Dice (the higher it is the bigger the dice you roll) and add them up to see if you beat your targets defence score. If you beat it, then you look at the dice you rolled and since the Pulse Laser has a damage rating of "Lowest" then you find the dice that rolled the lowest and cause that much damage.
If it had the Damage Rating of Highest you'd find the highest number rolled and cause that much damage, if it was Middle then you'd find the number in the middle (or if not applicable the highest).
So in this way, Lasers are accurate, but don't cause a lot of damage, but other weapons which are less accurate but more damaging can be simulated.

Theres also things like Torpedoes that constantly track you across turns, Missile salvoes that need to lock on to attack and Hard Turns, but that's basically it.

Edit: Well, that went quickly. We had a 100pt game using the Metal Express rules pointing system, which allowed him a Pair of Thunderbirds and a Salamander, two very solid choices and what I was going to pick. So I opted for a Nighthawk and a Seraph. He proceeded to blow me away with torpedoes in the second turn, because combat in Silent Death is LETHAL.

I then played X-Wing for the rest of the night. I lost there too, although thats because I was going Imps again, and I'm not really an Imperial player.