Hammerhead 2020 - After Action Report

Throughout the day, at Hammerhead 2020, I ran two full games of Zero Dark.  Each was  simple variation on the Rescue mission from the rulebook, but the outcomes were... rather different.  And it was interesting to see why.

The first mission was played in several chunks as players came and went.  Most of my players were of the younger sort, so they were happy to take advice and, when I had no players, I continued the game on my own.

As a result, the heroes made a cautious approach upon the enemy, by-passing or ignoring bogeys to get to the objective and only killing them when they had to.  The team's leader made it to the captured VIP and to one of the subordinate objectives, with support from the sapper's sentry gun and zipper drone to pick off immediate threats.

She took a serious hit on the way back, though, and we rushed K2 - running a medical program - up to save her before having the EWOp re-program the robot to an assault program to escort her back to the exfil point.

In the end, everyone made it out except for K2, who fought a valiant final stand, taking on enemy bogeys one by one.

It was the first mission I've played when there wasn't a single complication, and that came from carefully husbanding attacks and trying to keep at least one elite alive so that only Aces and Jokers would spark a complication.

The second playthrough began with a single player - an adult who was clearly used to playing skirmish games and who therefore pushed his team up quickly with normal moves, surgically eliminated the Red Force and grabbed the VIP.  But he hadn't counted on the chaos of complications.

First, he had to contend with the Defence Mech.  Then a booby trap went off, severely wounding the hero with the VIP and, to add insult to injury, he had a bad intel result - discovering when almost home and dry that he had accidentally snagged the VIPs captive body double instead of the VIP herself!

By this point I had two players and one of them, I think, lost patience at this point.  And when the next complication returned the Mech to the table, between him and his objective, decided he had better things to do (those are the breaks!).

The remaining player, though, stuck to his guns.  It was a tough run, with the doc bot doing his best to heal one of the surviving heroes.  But once the mech was, again, defeated and the VIP - again - secured, the lack of remaining cards meant he had to take the difficult decision to abandon two wounded heroes to their fate and rush to the exfil point.

It was victory, but a battered and bruised pyrrhic victory.

An important point did get to be played out, though, in both games.

One of the joys of the solo game is that you can adapt the rules on the fly to keep the game entertaining.  In the first game, one of our younger players pointed at a piece of terrain in the shape of a buggy-type car and asked if her EWOp could hack it.

Well, the rules say "no, it's just terrain".  But obviously I said "yes, go for it!"  She promptly hacked the buggy and drove it into the enemy Boss who was crushed underneath it.  Clearly a smart decision!  And the idea of hackable terrain is definitely one that I will be looking at in more detail.

In the second mission, I let the doc bot do a multi-heal - that is, every success on a medic test could be used to reduce the wounded state, not just one of them.  Not what the rules say, but it was the difference, in this case, between ignominious defeat and the chance at victory, so it made sense to give them the chance at victory.

When playing solo or co-op - especially when playing a one-off game - you  can always make this kind of decision to fudge the rules in the name of drama and having a fun time.