Infinite Dark - Versus Mission #1 - Aggressive Posture

Priority & the Control Deck

At the start of a Versus mission, split the control deck in half and shuffle one joker into one half and the other joker into the other half.

Designate the players "red" and "black" and flip the first card on the Control Deck. Whichever colour it is grants thar player priority for deployment.

When two opposed forces of equal size meet unexpectedly, it is rarely in anyone’s best interests to start the firefight. Rather, each will often seek to achieve a position of tactical dominance to assert their authority. Sadly, when neither is prepared to back down, violence will invariably follow.

Objective

The objective is to maximise your fleet’s tactical superiority whilst minimising your losses.

Deployment

Places jump-gates (stations) exactly 7” away from any two adjacent table edges in opposite corners. The player with priority picks a jump-gate as theirs and the other player takes the opposite one. Then the players alternate deploying vessels, with the first (priority player) deploying up to 12” from the jump-gate, the second (non-priority player) up to 11”, the third up to 10” etc to a minimum of 6” until one player has deployed all of their vessels.  If the other player has any vessels remaining, these are placed into reserve.

The player with priority has first activation.

Reserves

Vessels in reserve may be activated and deploy anywhere within 6” of their jump-gate. Deployment constitutes the whole of that vessel’s activation. Vessels in reserve do not have to be activated and do not count towards the number of deployed vessels.

Ending the Mission

The mission ends as soon as the second Joker is flipped. Each deployed vessel that has advantage is worth 5 points. Each point of hull damage carried by an enemy vessel is worth 1 point. Each enemy vessel destroyed is worth points equal to its POW.

Whichever player has the highest score wins.

EDIT - Added Map

NOTES

Obviously, it's pretty hard to playtest Versus missions, right now. But having wargamed this out a few times, I see several different strategic and tactical approaches players might take.

Strategically, a player may seek to minimise the size of their Fleet in order to limit how many vessels their opponent can deploy at the start of the game; maximise it in order to swamp the table and gain the most possible advantage, or pursue a balance to hedge against these strategies from the opponent.

Tactically, it may look like destroying an opponent is a poor outcome, but if it's an opponent with advantage, attacking them forces them to either use the advantage to improve their survivability or hold onto it and risk being destroyed.  If they are then destroyed they are effectively worth their MAS+5 because of the points swing that follows from losing a vessel with advantage.  The points for hull damage should encourage players to spread their fire widely and focus on larger vessels able to carry damage (and points).  The ideal would be to have an enemy vessel with no advantage and maximum hull damage whilst you retain your advantage.

With the end being dictated by the appearance of the second Joker, this prevents players from waiting too long to hoard advantage.

I'm tempted to change the Control Deck to put the first Joker just on the bottom of the top half.  This makes it a definite "hurry up" marker to indicate that the end of the battle may be imminent.  But initial testing suggests that, even it ends up being the first card flipped, it lends a pleasing air of uncertainty to the progression of events.