Hillbillies VS Aliens - A Day of Gaming

Last weekend I attended the Jacksonville Garrison club's Rapier game convention.There were three days full of roleplaying, historic miniature, sci-fi miniature, board and card games. I spent Saturday playing, a miniature figurine version of Fairy Meat. The gang of three cannibalistic I received were to scale. This means that any item on the table was considered terrain.

Someone had left a Zombie game on the table so all the pieces from the game became cover for the fairies to hide from the other fairy gangs. The idea of this game is to eat your competitors. Each character has magic spells and a weapon. A fun game based on a deck of cards and your stats for each of your characters. Everyone went after their neighbor and at the mid point of our game session the Game Master placed a mountain of Scooby Snacks that the fairies would try to conquer. My two fairies managed to take the hill and keep it. When a fairy eats the candy it enhances the stats of the fairy so that she becomes pretty hard to kill. I lost two fairies but managed to keep the hill. Any attack to conquer the hill was dealt most severely.

My second game session was a good round of Arkham Horror. I brought my own game and had a good number of people to play. This is a cooperative game where investigators must battle monsters and cultists that have emerged from gates that open up throughout Arkham. As well as closing and sealing the gates before the slumbering Mythos god or monster awakens. There is a bit of a learning curve as there are many aspects to the game as well as rethinking what winning a game means. In this particular game everyone must work cooperatively. Giving money or clue tokens to other characters to defeat the horror that has come to Arkham.

The last game of the day was Hillbillies vs Aliens. This game was run by to great guys Rick Weaver and Dan Van Horn. The time the 1950s, the place somewhere in the back woods. The aliens have come to earth to retrieve methane gas, that the cows supply, propane, that the trailer has, and alcohol supplied by the still. The aliens must fight the cantankerous hillbillies who own the trailer, still and individually named cows. To add an another element there is the local constabulary to investigate the moonshine operation of the "family".

The game mechanics were based on 3 die 6. All figures had basic move and attack as well as fire arms. I played Mama, buxom Sister, and Granny with her purse loaded with cellophaned hard candy and a gun. My friend Mitch played the aliens. Curtis a friend of Rick and Dan's played the Law and Steve played Paul, Duke the dog and other hillbilly guy.

The start of the game saw Granny, Mamma and Sister driving off from the law who have come to investigate the still. The heap actually worked. The Aliens land at this point trying to capture the the cows. The Law had shot up the trailer without blowing up the propane. Mama nearly ran over Debra the cow (named after a character in one of her stories)

The aliens proved to be a bit incompetent by leaving the activities director named Noob the man the ship as the others went on a retrieval mission. Many of the aliens try to ride the cows while eventually using the antigravity ray. Things go well for the aliens as Paul and Duke are very formidable adversaries. Duke uses one alien as a rag doll. While Paul decides to carry off what is left of one of the aliens. Paul has figured out how to use the very small ray gun and will use it against the sheriff who just blew up his still.

Mama at this point is driving through the aliens and crashing through some bushes. Granny is thrown out of the back of the truck. She thinks she broke her hip. Bus she is feisty and manages to shoot at a few of the cow stealing aliens. She goes as far as trying to capture an alien by luring it with some hard candy.

Mama manages to keep the heap in control. Sister and Mama manage to shoot the space ship. They have thoughts on turning the space ship into their new trailer.

Noob all the while has managed to raise the ship then crash the ship for failing to control the ship. Mama and Sister believe they brought the ship down. Noob had issued a May Day alert and have brought the mother ship into play. Noob knows how ever this does not bode well for his career and successfully jumped ship to join the family.

The law gave chase to the rest of the aliens and have managed to keep most of the cows earth bound. The mother ship transports the survivors and takes off. The family have plans on the ship.

The great aspect of this game is that everyone had improvised a good deal of role playing. What could have been a basic game of attack and defend turned out to be riot, as everyone started to role play all of their characters they were in control of. Mitch for instance played the aliens with a great comic flare. I played the women with determination in wanting a better place to live. Like you see in the magazines. Curtis played is police force as if they walked out of Mayberry with the sheriff a former high school football hero who played for Oklamhoma. Steve made sure that Duke was blood thirsty. And Rick played some great cows.