Games and figures by Matt Slade of Glenbrook Games and Painting Service. For details visit my website at
www.glenbrookgames.co.uk or email me at slade.m@sky.com
The following three blogs are of games played when Jason from the Reading club helped me christen the new wargames room this week following my move to the Forest of Dean.
Department X – The new series, now in glorious technicolour
Episode One – Rumble in the Jungle (Gather Scenario p 134)
The new top secret GB3 Robot Spy Plane has been flying over the People’s Democratic State of Tangerinia looking for signs of S.H.I.V.A. activity. The PDST is ruled by the despotic General Jaffa who is believed to be financed by SHIVA in exchange for secret bases and access to the country’s ample natural resources. The GB3 was just about to transmit the location of a major SHIVA base when it was apparently shot down. Dept X has sent in a crack unit of agents led by General Gordon to the point where contact was lost. The GB3 contains numerous experimental components crafted by the skilful hands of Doctor Hugo Solomon which must not fall into the hands of General Jaffa and his SHIVA masters. General Jaffa has dispatched his Tangerine Guard led by Colonel Outspan to recover the spy plane.
The cast
General Gordon, 10 agents including one Corporal.
Colonel Outspan, 10 mercenaries including one Corporal.
Dept X advance past an ancient totem.
The Dept X corporal is knocked out by the Colonel.
The Colonel is put out of action, but his men move on into the village.
The Tangerine Guard start to make inroads into the agents, resorting to brutal hand to hand combat.
Gordon steps in to counter attack the TG.
The TG grab a load of the components and start to take them back to their lines.
TG cover the retreat, having now gained all the counters representing vital parts of the GB3.
The guy in the Jon Motson coat brings the last componenet back to the SHIVA deployment zone.
The agents are unable to stop the SHIVA forces getting the components off table.
A frustrated Gordon curses his luck with initiative rolls.
This episode served as a nice easy reminder for myself and Jason as we had not played 7TV for a little while. The SHIVA forces faced a smaller but better force. They were very lucky with initiative rolls which went their way over a sustained period which allowed them to grab all the counters representing the GB3 components.
Doctor Hugo Solomon has been kidnapped while in a Buddhist retreat in Lincolnshire. In the previous episode General Gordon discovered that Solomon is being held in Waddington Hall, a country house cum health spa owned by General Jaffa in Little Fruiting in Oxfordshire. Agent Pandora King has gone undercover as a masseuse in what turns out to be a SHIVA safe house. General Gordon has received a signal from Pandora and leads a team to join up with her and find and rescue Solomon.
Waddington Hall
The cast
Pandora King, General Gordon, 10 agents including one Corporal
General Jaffa, Satsuma (Kali profile), 10 mercenaries including one Corporal
Colonel Outspan looks out over the grounds.
Outspan's mercenaries guard the gate.
More mercenaries patrol the perimeter.
The interior of Waddington Hall. In one of these rooms Solomon is being held. Pandora is just out of shot in the lounge where she has signaled that Dept X forces should attack.
Somehow the guards fail to notice that a squad of agents have jumped out of a Land Rover.
Outspan senses danger, "it's quiet, too quiet."
He is right as on the other side of the estate another Land Rover arrives with Gen Gordon and the rest of agents. The guards on this side are more awake and the peace is shattered as fire is exchanged across the boundary hedge.
Outspan pulls his men back to drive. Unaware that more agents are approaching from their rear.
"Miss King in the Lounge with a flamboyant but unconscious agent". Pandora turns over the first objective counter only to find Solomon at the first attempt.
Now aware that they are under attack from both sides, Outspan withdraws his men to the entrance of Waddington Hall where they take cover behind Gen Jaffa's car. Jaffa himself appears and warns that there will be hell to pay if car gets damaged. The Tangerine Guard try to stand to attention in the General's presence whilst ducking bullets.
In the hall, Satsuma finally notices the door to the lounge which keeps opening slightly. She investigates and uses her blowpipe signature weapon to knock out Pandora.
Gordon closes in but takes a hit from Satsuma's poisoned blow pipe.
Gordon continues to fight on his agents fall around him.
An outbreak of close quarter fighting leaves stunned bodies all over the grounds.
Outspan causes viewer complaints by "offing" an unconcious agents.
Gordon is rendered unconscious by another dart and is then given a blow from Satsuma's poisoned dagger.
This episode looked to be going the way of Dept X with the guards pinned down and Solomon being discovered on the first turn of an objective marker. Some insane counter attacking and lucky dice rolling by Jaffa's men in hand to hand knocked the Dept X lads down to shaken. Gordon managed to keep things going but the outrageous number of 6's rolled by Satsuma with her poisoned darts stopped Gordon and Pandora from taking advantage of their abilities. SHIVA were also helped by getting the field trials event card which gave them two extra boffins who kept them above half strength for that bit longer and gave a couple of easy VPS to include in their total.
Whilst held in Waddington Hall, Solomon was given an experimental SHIVA truth serum. All his knowledge of Dept X is now recorded on a newfangled cassette tape. During the fighting in episode 2, the Waddington sound wave transmitter was damaged and the tape was smuggled out of the Hall and flown out of the country. The head of SHIVA, the mysterious Guru, has decreed that the tape must be brought to him in his Tangerinia jungle base. Unknown to SHIVA, Solomon managed to place a micro-tracker device in General Jaffa’s underpants. Dept X deploys maximum resources to Tangerinia, their mission to salvage the cassette to prevent SHIVA finding out all their secrets. Pandora has been sent in to the base but has been captured and is being held along with a number of enslaved scientists.
The cast
Doctor Hugo Solomon, Pandora King, General Gordon, 16 agents including 1 Sergeant and 1 Corporal
The Guru, Satsuma (Kali profile), General Jaffa, Colonel Outspan, 4 technicians, 2 fembots, 10 Mercenaries including 1 Corporal
Special rules
The game starts with the cassette in the possession of the Guru in his office. The data up-loader is in the control room. It takes a full turn to start the upload of the data. The data up-loader must be attended by at least one technician at all times. At the end of each turn where a technician has been at the controls for the whole turn, roll 1d6 and keep a tally. Once a total of 14 is reached, the cassette data has been successfully loaded on the SHIVA super computer and can be transmitted to all SHIVA bases once the super computer has translated the signal into binary code which it will do once the total reaches 30.
The super computer is invulnerable to attack but the transmitter can be damaged. There is an aerial loop around the base which must be powered at all times to give the clearest signal. There are four markers representing power sources. If two of these are destroyed (def 4, hits 1) then a -1 is applied to the SHIVA technicians dice, if all four are destroyed then a -2 is applied.
SHIVA additional objectives – successful up load of the data (bonus 5 VPs), successful transmission (bonus 5VPs)
Dept X additional objectives – recover/destroy the cassette (bonus 5 VPs), +1 VP for every enslaved scientist who escapes off the friendly table edge.
The Guru's super computer room. As in the previous game, two scientists arrive due to the Field Trials card. Will they prove as valuable?
Pandora and the captive scientists in the cells.
The Guru in his office with his sidekick General Jaffa.
The Dept X Agents begin to cautiously advance into the jungle base.
Dr Solomon (played by Patrick MacNee in this episode) escorted by Dept X agents.
General Gordon, recently recovered from his encounter with Satsuma's blow pipe, leads the rest of the Dept X agents.
The jungle base. Top left Guru's lair, top right the computer room. The more central building is the cell area.
Colonel Outspan leads a squad of his mercenaries to defend the right side of the base.
Two Femdroids swing their hips down the centre. Their technician looks on proudly.
The two Field Trials scientists are put to work readying the computer to up load the cassette. They also provide the Guru with another activation counter.
Agents move along the right side of base towards Col Outspan.
The agents on both sides of the base take out two of the control boxes, slowing the functioning of the Guru's super computer and tranmitter much to the annoyance of Outspan who looks on helplessly.
Outspan and his men are caught in a blast from the Confusion Beam in Solomon's umbrella and are forced back. Hopefully the femdroids will deal with the threat. Sadly they are put out of action almost immediately by Solomon's distructor ray.
Pandora has taken an invisibility serum and has managed to pick the lock of the cells. The scientists form a conga line and make their way back towards the agents and freedom.
In a scene lost in the archives, Pandora used her invisibilty to creep over to right of the base where the lovely but lethal Satsuma was waiting to blowpipe Gordon again. Pandora floored Satsuma and a mercenary in a flurry of judo-fu.
Things now look grim for the Guru. With two of the control boxes damaged the loading of the cassette is taking forever. On the right, Satsuma is stunned and the guards are under pressure. On left, the outbreak of confusion amongst Outspan's men has them reeling and Solomon has dealt with the Femdroids. The Guru and Jaffa are forced to get more involved.
Solomon gets a taste of confusion as the Guru mind blasts him in revenge for the destruction of his femdroids by the Doc's disintegrator attachment to his brolly of doom.
Solomon is still confused as he is attacked by Jaffa and a merenary.
The hand to hand combat in the foreground went on almost the whole game without resoloution. The Guru uses his menatl powers to mind blast the agent at the left of the picture after the wiggling hips of the femdroid draw the agent out cover.
Satsuma still lies stunned. She is only saved by the arrival of a technician who patches up the damaged femdroid. The femdroid and the mercenary returned on the reinforcement card - just in the nick of time to knock Pandora out of the game in a hail of rifle and nipple gun fire.
As pressure mounts on Dept X, Gordon and his remaining agents fall back to protect the scientists who start to come under threat from a counter attack.
The fight on the left side of the base swings the way of the Guru's men after some very lucky recovery rolls see the return of some stunned mercenaries.
The femdroid is damaged again. The technician put her back into action with some good repair rolling.
Solomon is on his own now, carrying two hits and under threat from Jaffa and the Guru.
The hand to hand continues (yawn)
Solomon makes a dash for the Control Room hoping to sieze the cassette tape. He is finally cornered by Jaffa and is knocked unconscious. There will have to be a second series....
This episode like the last, swung back and forth dramatically. Dept X were all over the Guru's forces in the early stages. The Guru and Jaffa were forced to get heavily involved. Some timely event cards worked in their favour, especially the reinforcements who came on the table just in time to knock Pandora out before she could wrea hand to hand havoc on the mercenary guards having taken out Satsuma. The confusing of Solomon was key as that allowed the Guru's men to take a few sneaky hits off of him.
Dept X advance past an ancient totem.
The Dept X corporal is knocked out by the Colonel.
The Colonel is put out of action, but his men move on into the village.
The Tangerine Guard start to make inroads into the agents, resorting to brutal hand to hand combat.
Gordon steps in to counter attack the TG.
The TG grab a load of the components and start to take them back to their lines.
TG cover the retreat, having now gained all the counters representing vital parts of the GB3.
The guy in the Jon Motson coat brings the last componenet back to the SHIVA deployment zone.
The agents are unable to stop the SHIVA forces getting the components off table.
A frustrated Gordon curses his luck with initiative rolls.
