At 2pm the fifth crowd arrived. I determined their arrival point randomly, but they ended up pretty close to the town hall. The SF were pretty stretched but they still had their riot squad horses in reserve and so called on them. I had given the SF access to a bunch of soldiers, too, but they were not deemed necessary (if soldiers get defeated in melee there's a small chance they just open fire indiscriminately).
The second crowd were now riled up to the maximum level 8 and charged the main group of police.
The final group were also getting riled up, having seen the riot police turn up and the gas going off.
All in all it was getting a bit messy. At this point istm the sides were quite evenly balanced and the game was quite interesting. I had selected the sides solely on what was in my figure collection, so it was lucky it felt pretty balanced.
Players have individual figures to represent themselves as well as groups of figures to command. This guy was in overall command of the SF and he had stayed in reserve so far, directing things from a distance. Instead of ordering a cavalry charge he now decided to attempt to reason with the new crowd. I only attempted this coz I wanted to see the rules in action. Rolling poorly he actually riled up the crowd more and made the situation worse.
The second group managed to injure another police officer.
The order was given for the mounted riot police charge. This comes with a very high modifier (as you might expect) and it managed to disperse a big chunk of the crowd, and injure a few.
The main police line decided to retreat a bit and see whether this would mollify the crowd a bit. As it happens there is nothing in the system to support this once things get going. Istm once the fighting starts and the crowd are riled up, the only way to get them to calm down is to beat it into them.
So the crowd charged to police lines again, and this time they broke through. Two more police were injured and the local news got a quick interview with one of the rioters.
The ambulance bloke was having a very busy day and decided this WPC had to go straight to hospital, although she would live.
The breakthrough crowd, which had been down to a single stand of hardcore since quite early on, got charged by the final police reserve, which they withstood.
The commander of the riot police decided to have a go at calming this section of crowd but was not successful, probably all the tear gas got in the way.
And he ordered his riot police to charge the other rioters in the rear, effectively surrounding them.
The frontline hardcore saw off the police reserve (I imagine they were in reserve coz they weren't very good).
And the mounted riot police beat their rioters so badly it dropped their RL to 3, which meant they were no longer interested in a confrontation.
The rioters in the rear didn't want to approach the massed ranks of riot police, especially through the tear gas. But as they were still RL7 they would still be up for property damage and looting. As they were in a residential area I decided that they would satisfy themselves with setting fire to a skip, instead.
These guys were surrounded and soon most of them were dispersed or arrested.
The hardcore who had been at the sharp end for the entire afternoon and withstood a lot of police confrontation finally managed to get to General Fredo's car (it was still only about 3:20 so he wasn't due out yet) and proceeded to vandalise it.
At this stage the situation around the town hall was pretty much contained and the hardcore wouldn't last much longer with all the riot police around. The rioters had made their point, wrecked the generals car, and still owned the territory further down the street. The police had kept the general safe.
I feel like this is a decent game. Some of the rules were unclear or vague, and I felt like the author was making some assumptions based on other games he played, that I couldn't make. They got a bit confusing when dealing with melee, sometimes referring to figures, and sometimes to bases. I decided to do everything by bases.
There were so many injuries so quickly, that I got a bit bored with dealing with them, so I adjusted them downwards quite early in the game. I am going to have a think about how to do this permanently. I might just ignore rioter injuries and only deal with SF ones, and make them rarer, and give them explicit victory points. This way it will give the SF some decent motivation for managing their injuries. I think I will lose the 'death' result as well, just to keep things a bit lighter.
I feel like I would like some sort of points system to show the players how well they did, or more like how badly they did, all scores for injuries, deaths, damage, etc, being in the minuses.
All in all I liked it. I will make a few adjustments for my tastes and maybe to give the players more decisions to make (there was a lot for the umpire to do compared to how many decisions the players had to make, which isn't ideal). As ever, with this sort of participation game, the fun will be had in how the players get into their roles and the spirit of the game.
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