Well, things didn't go exactly as planned at this scenario. This was my first non-military scenario and the first scenario Rogue Cell officially attended as a team. The concept was interesting enough, with the whole Hatfield family fighting the McCoy family thing.
The objectives were very clear and straightforward, which can be a rarity at bigger scenario games. A lot of the times, most of the crowd doesn't know what the objectives are and only the "in crowd" of generals and local teams actually know what's up. This wasn't the case here, in my opinion. Everyone I ran across during the game could update me on what was going on at that particular time. I had no problem following the course of events and was able to keep Rogue and A-TAC on the same page.
The sequence of objectives were as follows: Each family had to acquire cash (packets of Monopoly money) that was in mailboxes (red buckets hanging from trees) scattered across the field. The cash was then taken to the General Store and exchanged for yellow or red (team dependent) gallon jugs. The jugs then had to be taken to moonshine stills (55-gallon drums full of water) which were also scattered throughout the field. Once the jugs were filled from the stills, each team had to return them to their base and hide them at their Bank, upon which more cash would be deposited in the mailboxes and the sequence would begin again. Periodically through the game, the refs would tally up the jugs each team had and the scores would be recorded at the staging area in order to display which team was winning. If a family captured the other's jugs, they were awarded triple points. Flag stations where a red or yellow flag could be raised were also located across the field at various points, but I'm not sure what they were for. I just made sure the yellow flag was up whenever I passed one.
The refs were a little on the bossy side, but I thought they did a great job at keeping the game moving and not allowing one side or the other to get too much of an advantage; i.e. camping at spawn points, obvious cheating, etc. There were also quite a few which was a pleasant change. Everywhere I ended up, which happened to be at the major objectives, there seemed to be at least two refs. Kudos to Gold Diggers.
One of the biggest problems at the game was the cheap paint. It seemed to break a helluva lot and everywhere I looked, people had their guns apart and were cleaning the blue paint out. The cold air temperature made things even worse, causing the cheap paint to be even more brittle. It was playing havoc with the Cyclones. I didn't have a problem earlier in the day, because my hopper wasn't working anyways, so I was downgraded to a gravity feed. I did eventually break paint in the barrel, but that was an easy fix. Blindside and I eventually just downloaded our weapons and became scouts/runners, moving with an escort and making sure the objectives were completed at high speed.
After lunch, I came up with the plan was to acquire as many jugs as we could, fill them, empty the stills, and take the jugs back to our base. The idea was to deny the enemy the opportunity to fill their jugs after we had left the still, then commence raiding operations to steal their jugs. Then our family, the McCoys, would have most of the jugs and would only have to concentrate on defending the jugs until the end of the day. It worked perfectly. We had most of the jugs and a huge score advantage over the Hatfields and all of the stills were empty. We even had empty jugs we had taken off the dead bodies of the enemy as they ran around looking for a place to fill them. It was close to the end of the day, so we began to empty all of our jugs in order to deny the Hatfields an opportunity to recapture them, since empty jugs were worthless.
Well, this leads to one of the biggest problems we encountered. The owner of the field then changed the rules, in the middle of the game and without warning, simply because he was pissed that we had outsmarted the game and the Hatfields. Right after we emptied all of our jugs, he decrees that empty jugs now hold the same value as full jugs. This happens very conveniently as the Hatfields take our base and raid our bank. This allows them to regain the lead and hold it until the very end of the game. Everyone was very disappointed and since it was near the end of the day, people just started leaving. Not cool at all. Even some of the Hatfields thought it was uncool of the owner, even though it gave them an advantage.
Other than that situation, which I think disappointed a lot of people, we had a good time. It was good to back on the field and it was really good to see the A-TAC guys, even if Rick didn't show up. I think Rogue Cell and A-TAC will have a long and pleasant relationship in the future. The game was fun and I can say with ease that Rogue Cell will go back to Gold Diggers if there is another big event.
