Zorper and I combined the contents of our two Halo: Ground Command starter boxes a few weeks ago for one large game of King of the Hill. We used one of the standard bunkers from the starter box as the objective. This was the second game for both of us. I unfortunately didn't take any overall pictures of the board.
This is an interesting scenario because units activate as they come on the table, so there is no trying to line up units against each other in initial deployment. The objective is to occupy a bunker on a hill in the center of the board. I played the UNSC; given that we had two battlegroups on the table, I took two Spartans, both armed with standard assault rifles (in retrospect I should have given one of them a Spartan Laser). We called them Spartan Red and Spartan Black (due to how they were painted).
Turn One was spent pretty much with units deploying onto the board and executing flat-out moves to get into position. We both drove most of our infantry units straight towards the hill in the center where the bunker was located, with vehicles moving along the flanks.
Units started dying in Turn Two. Much like Halo: Fleet Battles, units tend to either be alive or dead...they don't usually hang around damaged or degraded. At least, that's the case with Infantry units. We each had a couple occasions where an entire Infantry unit was eliminated in Offensive or Reactive Fire--in my case, it was Hunters that eliminated my formation, and in his case it was Reactive Fire from a full-strength Warthog unit.
In one of the most cinematic moments of the game, his Hunters charged and entered Melee combat with my Warthogs...
They eliminated the lead Warthog; we assumed one of the Hunters lifted the vehicle and just threw it off the battlefield.
In Turn Three, my Fire Support unit killed off one of those Hunters with rockets. Spartan Red also made a flat-out run and got into the bunker, much to the consternation of the Covenant! On the other side of the board, my other Warthog unit had to deal both with enemy Infantry and Ghosts. I learned quickly that Warthogs with chain guns just really aren't equipped to deal with Ghosts!
I was able to hold the bunker through Turns Three and Four, but then...in Turn Five...
The Elite Zealot conducted a melee attack against Spartan Red! To his credit, Red did kill a Grunt Levy element and an Elite Minor as the unit approached, but the Elite Zealot caused two wounds in the melee...and Spartan Red failed both his heroic saves!!!! That was pretty much the last activation of the game. Quite a cinematic ending!
After all was said and done, the Covenant squeaked out a win, 25 VP to 19 VP. It was a good game, and nice to play with two full battlegroups (even if they were both identical to each other). We're still learning the game, so repetition helps, and you get more repetition with more units on the table. We put out a pretty healthy amount of terrain so that no one unit could dominate the battlefield. Even with two Spartans, neither of us felt that they were unstoppable. He did have a bit of trouble dislodging Spartan Red from the bunker, but the Elite Zealot made it look easy once he closed in melee combat.
We've only played just two games, but we both really enjoy it so far. Lots of cool moments, cinematic moments, like I described above...and like this:
Happy to run a demo game for anyone who's interested.
Thanks for reading!
