Majestic 13: Test Play #1, "Keel's Killers Vs. the Avenkian Shrieker"

The other day I picked up a new solo/co-op skirmish game called Majestic 13 from Snarling Badger Studios. Premise is you have a team of five operatives who belong to one of 13 organizations that have joined forces to protect the earth from an alien threat; in most games, this threat is made manifest as a single big, brutal monster with a lot of hit points. The video game series "X-COM" gets referenced quite a bit as a comparison, but I've never played it so I can't say much on that point. Realizing that I had everything I needed already painted, it was short work to print up the PDF, roll up my team, and get a test game on the table.

 I'd initially planned on playing out my first test game tomorrow, Sunday the 18th, as I was scheduled for two RPG sessions today - but I woke up feeling a head cold coming on, so I bowed out of my afternoon in-person game, and the online game I'd been scheduled for this evening was postponed by the GM. So, with my evening suddenly free, I figured I'd move up my first playtest to tonight.

 My group is "Keel's Killers" - a group of roughnecks (oil rig workers, industrial welders, etc.) given guns and told to stomp mudholes in monsters. Their leader, Johanna Keel, is a veteran of Majestic 13, having pulled this new group together after being the sole survivor of a previous team. 

Left to Right: Keel, Barker, Moseley, Arnold and Klass

Rolling a few dice, I determined they'd be fighting in a wilderness area and facing off against an Avenkian Shrieking Shock Trooper, one of 26 monster archetypes presented by the game. In this case it's a pretty straight-forward brawler type that also has an area of effect attack - by shrieking, it can deal damage over a 12" radius, which is quite a bit when you're playing on a 3'x3' board! I picked a Reaper Bones "Gloom Stalker" (or in D&D terms, a Hook Horror) to represent the monster.

"If you go down to the woods to-day..."

The monster activated first, and charged across the board into Moseley, scoring a critical hit, dealing (2D6+3)x2 damage which was...not great for Moseley. Pretty much everyone else moved in close and started shooting, which worked great until the monster took damage - another feature of its stat block is every time it takes damage, everyone within 12" needs to make a saving throw or take damage as well! After that everyone started spacing out and shooting from a distance, while Moseley tried to get away and maybe reach Barker or Arnold, both of whom were carrying medical kits. 

Unfortunately, while restrained in the monster's claws, Moseley fell victim to a flash bang grenade thrown by Keel, leaving him stunned as the monster finished him off. The Avenkian then turned it's attention to Barker while the team continued to (try to) shoot at it. Arnold never successfully put a round into the monster, despite having an average chance of success. 

 

The game has a FUBAR mechanic - each turn, a D6 is rolled and the current turn number added to it; on a result of 6+, something has gone wrong, ranging from civilians wandering on to the battlefield, another monster showing up, or in this case, an errant drone strike potentially hitting our heroes. On turn 5, Keel took 3D6 damage from said errant drone strike. 

Games end automatically after the end of Turn 5, and if you haven't killed the monster by then, you're SOL - team-members who are still alive flee the scene, and the monster becomes someone else's problem while you're debriefed and recover. At the end of Turn 5, I'd reduced the monster to half its starting hit points. Following this, there's a whole mini-game of seeing how your team-members recover (or if not, whether their cloned replacements are weird or not), and trying to requisition upgraded gear and improvement's to your team's base of operations from the bureaucracy. I haven't delved into that yet; I figure I'll play a couple of test games to get the feel of things and then maybe dive into the full campaign experience the game is geared towards. 

I don't have enough knowledge of game design to feel I can truly comment on the mechanics that much, but I will say that I really enjoyed how fast-paced the game is, and the 5-turn time limit keeps things from bogging down. I felt like I picked up and fully absorbed a lot of the mechanics very quickly. Also, with charts to roll on to randomly generate locales, terrain, threats and bureaucratic complications, I feel confident in saying that this is a game that can easily stay fresh for a very long time, with no two games being the same.

One thing that will take some getting used to for me is some of the spinning plates - for example, I think I forgot to roll a FUBAR check on turn 4, and I'm pretty sure I forgot about the monster's reactive area of effect ability on one of the turns where it received damage and there were team-members within 12". 

All that being said, I had a great time with my first play through, and making it through with three team members intact and the monster reduced to half-hit points feels like victory enough for a first play. I'm looking forward to rolling up another table's worth of terrain and a fresh monster tomorrow.