A little while ago I mentioned that the way different people choose to play Close Encounters can be interesting. In this post, we’ll look at some of the play styles I’ve commonly seen.
Trooper Play Styles
Keep it tight, people! Some players keep their troopers in a close formation. They try to keep them mutually supporting each other – rifles giving cover fire, pistols guarding the rifles, and the blade trooper leading the advance. A squad operating like this can be a tough nut to crack… but it also moves quite slowly, which means the bugs have more opportunities to prepare nasty surprises.
Go, go go! Another common choice is for the troopers to scatter out as individuals. To be fair, this is sometimes a response to enemy activity, and in some missions it works very well – if you move fast enough and explore quickly enough, you might get to your objective before the bugs can do anything about it. It often leads to the troopers being turned into individual crunchy snacks for the bugs, however.
By Sections! The other common trooper play style I see is squad members being paired off and each pair operating semi-independently. Usually it’s a rifle trooper and a pistol trooper in each pair, with the blade trooper acting as a scout or a mobile reserve. This has the advantage of covering more ground than a tight formation, while being a bit more survivable than scattering in all directions. It doesn’t so much maximise advantages as reduce disadvantages, however, so it isn’t particularly good at anything.
Kill, kill, KILL! Okay, this isn’t so much a play style as a failure mode of the others, but I still see it a lot. It’s common for trooper players to get fixated on killing bugs. They’ll spend actions to shoot bugs which aren’t really much threat. I absolutely understand the desire, but it’s often a trap: you only win by achieving your mission, which may not involve killing things.
Run, run, RUN! The inverse of the above, this is where trooper players get really risk-averse and run away from stacks of bugs, or even tile layouts, that look dangerous. This is not actually such a bad thing sometimes – the further a bug stack moves, the weaker it gets, so running away can be an effective tactic. But when the only motivation is “get away from the scary thing”, it often leads to paralysis. The troopers are holed up, safe for now but not advancing. And, in the darkness, the bugs gather in ever-increasing stacks…
Bug Play Styles
The Lurker Some bug players like to keep hidden as much as they can. They hide around corners and behind walls, out of the line of fire, only popping out when they think they can grab someone. This can be effective, and it makes for a tense game which is often pretty cool. It often means the troopers are setting the pace of the game, though, and the lurker may find their bug stacks are intact and well-positioned, but the troopers have just won the game.
The Leaper More or less the polar opposite of the lurker, the leaper attacks at every opportunity. They spawn as close as possible to their targets: even if only one bug can attack, they seem to figure that a small chance is better than none, and it certainly puts pressure on the troopers. Again, though, it often turns into small stacks of bugs getting shot to bits for little gain.
Kill, kill, KILL! Yep, you guessed it – the same as for the troopers, except this time it’s the bugs getting fixated on racking up kills. Again, it’s an easy thing to do – that’s often how you win, after all, so it’s easy to get used to doing that. However, several times now I’ve seen bug players lose missions which they really should have won, simply because they got so hung up on trying to get kills that they forgot about what the troopers were trying to achieve… a mistake which was soon pointed out to them by their opponents.
What’s my play style? Well, I try to vary it depending on the needs of the mission… but my natural impulse is to be a lurker as the bugs, and keep it tight as the troopers. I tend to be a bit cautious in play, so I need to remind myself to take risks sometimes.
What’s your play style, and how does it compare with your usual gaming group? Let me know in the comments or by email!
Encounter Table Games 