Last thursday I went to the games 2006 in Essen, Germany and had a test game of AT43 at the Rackham counter. They had a couple of AT43 boxes there and some scifi terrain and told us the minis used for demo games were straight out of the box.Here are some of my observations...
Look and feel of the AT43 minis:
- Nice, better painted than DnD minis, with a few washes and highlighting they should turn out really nice
- The fire toad and Golem(?) are hard plastic with lots of movable parts.The fire toad can open its cockpit, move weapons while the Golem can move its legs and the weapons as well. Fire toad had lots of nice decals on it.
- The human and alien soldiers are made of a DnD miniature like softer plastic, slightly bendable
- A few nice gimmicks: human soldiers have interchangable heads e.g. you could swap a gasmask head for an officers one; the human torsos can be turned to the left and right allowing you to slightly alter the poses
Some Gameplay notes:
- turnplay is exactly like in Confrontation, you roll for initiative and then alternating with your opponent you reveal your cards, moving/shooting with the unit the card displays (in the game this had the effect that everybody moved their walker first, because it had the biggest weapons....)
- all measurements are in cm, a simple "ruler" is provided in the box
- the game was fairly quick approx. 15min (each player had 1 walker, 2x 4 men squads, one heavy weapon guy which also was the leader)
- LOS is always taken from the squad leader, e.g. if your leader stands behind a corner and the rest of his troup (which have to be in 10 cm of him) stand next to the corner in the open, your troup wouldn´t be able to shoot and couldn´t be shot at by enemies on the other side of the corner because they don´t have LOS to the leader!
- there are 8-10 range zones each 10cm wide, some weapons (from the walkers) cause automatic hits while within zone 1 (10cm) or 2 (20cm) otherwise a standard to hit roll with one D6 is applied. On the small demo table with ~ 60x60 cm this meant that the fire toad walker caused autohits once you are in range of the enemy....
- some weapons have mulitple attack die to roll, no area effects though
- after hitting you roll for wounding with one D6, there was no autokill though (2+ was the lowest)
- units don´t have saving throws, a kill is a kill
- units can run and then gain (I think) 10 cm. Alien soldier base speed was 18cm
- units can shoot, move and attack in CC in one turn
- if a leader gets killed the next model takes over his leader position (leaders in our game were the guys with heavy weapons though in a normal non demo game that is not allowed however we were told)
- there is quick reference table supplied in the box from which you can quickly check out what dice roll you need if a fire toad shoots at an alien Golem within 30 cm e.g. and what score to kill.
Some more notes:
- in the demo game the aliens did win alot more times than the humies we were told, this was probably to the fact that the games were fought in very close quarters, where the aliens are better fighters and probably boast more firepower there too (don´t quote me on that though )
- the game play/feel itself was not so detailed though remember this was only a demo game and had streamlined rules. We were shown unit cards which had hit zones for the walkers e.g., we just played with 5 wound points.
- there a size categories for vehicles, the walker were size 6 I think and there are sizes up to 8 so we can expect tanks/bigger walkers then the ones in the box! Yay!
Bottomline:
All in all AT43 looks quite promising in my opinion, the minis are nice and have some nifty gimmicks (exchangable heads,poseable) and the rules seem to allow a straight forward gameplay with enough room for expansion with more detailed rules.
Well I for myself am looking forward to see more from At43,Go Rackham ,go!