“Talon Tuesdays” is an article series appearing on InsideGMT periodically on Tuesdays.  It features articles from the Talon development team regarding the game’s design, development and upcoming release.

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Issue #1 – Dice Tower Convention 2015

I had the pleasure of taking Talon to Dice Tower Con 2015 in Orlando, FL this past June. It was my second trip to the convention, having gone in 2014 as well. It’s a fantastic convention and really well run (kudos to Heather Mann and Patrick Havert, the chief organizers). They predominantly have “mainstream” gamers there with only a few traditional war gamers peppered in. This was exactly the reason I’ve brought Talon to the convention for the last two years.

I believe that Talon, like Jim Krohn’s other GMT product “Space Empires: 4x”, has broad appeal. It’s a really accessible, easy to pick up but difficult to master tactical war game.  Demo-ing the game countless times at Dice Tower has proven this to be true.

Patrick Barely, my right-hand man on the development team, and I printed and cut 4 prototype copies of the game.  Our goal at this year’s convention was to hold a tournament.  You would think it would be hard to hold a tournament for a game that has not yet been released, but Talon is very easy to pick up. The Dice Tower folks were kind enough to give us prime real estate in the main gaming room for our booth. This let us teach and demo the game to all passers-by for the first few days of the con. Eight of the people we taught felt confident enough to attend the tournament held on the Friday of the convention.  

The tournament was single elimination, 1 on 1, medium sized fleet battles. We pre-made a selection of 3 fleets for each faction, each with a different design doctrine. For the Terrans, one fleet emphazied Fighters, another was mostly Cruisers and the last was a Battleship with a small entourage. The Talons brought similar fleets: a missile heavy fleet, a Cruiser heavy fleet and a fleet with a Dreadnaught and not much else.

These fleets were point balanced so they were all nearly equal in power.

Faction selection was determined by the “home team player”. The “home team” was randomly selected in the first round. In subsequent rounds the “home team” was the player who scored more Victory Points per the Lifetime Score rules in the Talon rulebook. You basically get more victory points for a battle depending on how well you won: how many enemy ships you destroyed vs your own ships lost.

Most Talon games, particularly with large fleets, take about 90 mins. In order to keep the pace moving throughout the tourney, we held games to 60 mins. The player with the most Ship Points worth of ships destroyed (so long as they destroyed > 100 points worth of ships to prevent hit and run tactics) was declared the winner after 60 mins of play. Remaining ships in play were considered to have retreated.

The first battle took place in empty space. Tourney round 2 in a nebula and Tourney round 3 around a Black Hole!

Tom was our ultimate winner and an unlikely one at that.  He had some background in Star Fleet Battles; Talon, in many ways is a reaction to SFB. His background didn’t help him at all in the first round.  Tom narrowly escaped with a win.  He destroyed just enough ships (1) JUST as the buzzer hit 60 mins. None of the other tournament games were so closely decided.  His second round game was a bit more straight forward but he still did not have home-field advantage going into the Championship round.  Alex, Tom’s opponent in the final, had been taking care of business with the Terran Cruiser fleet against Adam and Brian. In the final Alex continued with the Terran Cruiser fleet and gave Tom the Talon to play with. Tom picked the missile fleet. Tom had only been the Terran thus far and I didn’t think he’d be able to adapt quickly to the Talon faction’s style of play.

Tom with Talon artwork autographed by Jim Krohn. Tom will also receive a copy of Talon on release.

Alex, second place winner.

Brian, third place winner by total victory points.

Fortunately for Tom, I was wrong. Tom chose the missile fleet and danced around the black hole, picking off a few smaller ships then finally, as the clock ran down; Tom launched a barrage of missiles from long range.  Under normal circumstances, the Terran player might have been able to put some distance between the missiles and then have his ships pick off the missiles. However, Tom used the Black Hole’s gravity to ensure that the enemy ships were pulled INTO THE MISSILES before they could shoot them down. This decimated the Terran fleet and all but ended the game.

Wayne teaching Space Empires.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t talk about Space Empires here.  It’s one of my favorite games to play and teach and, while I did not bring a demo of the upcoming expansion: Replicators, to the convention I brought multiple copies to play and teach. We held a tournament on Saturday.  When I was organizing the event schedule on BGG in the months prior to the convention, my plan for the Space Empires event was to do a big game, maybe even 2 maps (8 empires) over the course of an afternoon.

We ran into two problems with that idea.  One was, I had lost track of the Events thread on BGG and missed a couple player requests to be added to the game list. As such they rescheduled themselves for other games, which was understandable. We wound up with 6 players, most of which had minimal experience with Space Empires.  This, unfortunately, ruled out playing a big game with Advanced Rules and maybe some Close Encounters features added in for flavor.  Instead we decided to hold a 2 round tourney using base game rules only, since everybody had that level of familiarity. The first round was two 3-player games using the colony victory point rules.  We mandated a 2 hour time limit on the game to keep things moving.  If there was a tie at 2 hours for colony points, the victor was the one who destroyed the most CP worth of enemy ships. The winners of the Round 1 game would face off in a 1 on 1 small map championship game.

Jamie with a copy of Space Empires, autographed by Jim Krohn. The game is already punched and the counters were put into plastic holders for easy storage too.

Ultimately Jamie won.  While Jesse had a massive fleet ready to obliterate Jamie, poor placement allowed a smaller, more mobile fleet of Cruisers to enter Jesse’s home planet orbit and decimate it, ending the game.

Jamie vs. Jesse in the final.

A big shout-out goes to Wayne. He played in the Round 1 game. He was one of the players that was anticipating the big Space Empires game. I failed to deliver. But, Wayne was a great sport and also helped me teach the new players during the tournament. Thanks!

Stay tuned for more!

Next Article in the Series: Talon Tuesday Issue #2 – Example of Play Part 1

Author: Bob Seifert