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Mark and I have been playing a heavily rewritten form of “The Admiral’s Game” campaign from Advanced Missions. This is based on a version played on the SFB forums… nearly two decades ago.

I’ve thought about those old campaigns a bunch in the years since then, and that’s how I came to write up my own rules. Recently, I’ve started a thread about my rules over on Board Game Geek. Feel free to look in there and comment. Campaigns are big investments, but very tempting ones; I wish we had a bit more time to dedicate to such projects.

The current version of my rules are downloadable here.

I’ve provided some of my thinking, and overall prep work for our group’s current date of Y162 on the BGG thread.

I’ve spent a fair amount of time studying costs and worked out an overall general income schedule that I think will work (Y170-Y180 income might need to go a little higher), and I’ve talked about it in a series of posts starting here recently.

I have also started a solo campaign with the Klingons invading the Federation in Y162. I report on it in that thread as well, and in this post I show the purchases for both sides. This is generally the one secret part of the campaign, so it’s not something I can show off in the game with Mark. The next post gives the Y162 deployments for both sides. One actual battle resulted, with the other battles being too lopsided to play.

That one battle was entertaining. The full writeup starts here, but the summary is that a Federation CC and CA tried to take out a Klingon ship (possibly one of the two E4s present) and then escape before the Klingons can do too much damage. Random terrain generated a sparse asteroid field, which forced shorter ranges than the originally envisioned prox-torp duel. Neither side played that well (me playing both of them keeps me from coming up with anything brilliant, and I’m often doing this while distracted), and ended up with a close range pass at the top of turn 3.

IKV Desecration (D6-21) was absolutely gutted in the exchange (six power left), while CC USS Kongo (NCC-1710) lost the front shield and a good number of phasers. She ran for distance, while CAR USS Defiance (NCC-1717) couldn’t quite do internals to IKV Devastator (D7-15), but forced her away from Kongo. The two E4s also don’t do more than shield damage to Kongo, and one took a handful of internals in return.

Defiance turned in for a shot at Devastator, neither side did much, and Defiance dodged around her to get at Desecration, ending with her destruction. Defiance is now alone, and dodged through an asteroid cluster with and lost the #1 to take internals from hitting too many asteroids (in addition to what the pursuing Klingons manage). Both Star Fleet vessels disengaged off the map. The Klingons technically won, but Star Fleet accomplished the primary mission. However, both ships were too heavily damaged for easy repairs, and may sit out next year (Kongo especially).

I’m delaying getting back to the campaign right now… and may start a Hydran one to see how the campaign rules with fighters actually work in practice. I’m currently doubting whether the Hydrans can be competitive with my current setup.