This is the first of my reports from Origins 2008, which ended on
Sunday, June 29, 2008.  I brought back around 130 pictures, which I’ll
be sharing the rest of the week here on the site.

The last few years at Origins, I’ve played a game run by Red Shirt Games.  This year was no exception.  The game in question is their “Injurius Games”
product.  Injurius Games is a futuristic squad-based gladiatorial-style
arena tabletop miniatures game that has a relatively easy to learn rule
set but enough complexity to keep it from getting old.  As they
describe it on their site, “this system is based on the premise that
gamers want realism, but not at the expense of gameplay and fun.”

In
past years, Red Shirt has run Injurius Games with its human gladiators
on a 3″ by 3″ grid.  This year, the human gladiators were replaced with
Mecks like these:

There are four basic types of Meck units in the game.  First is the “leader” unit, known as the Jumper:

As
you may be able to read in the picture, the Jumper packs 3 Autocannons.
It has no energy shield (ES), armor against physical impacts (APAC) of
8, 2 movement points (MP), and it requires 4 command points (CP) to
“inspire” its performance (i.e., improve its chances to hit). The
Autocannons can fire at targets in short range (1-5 squares), medium
range (6-10 squares), and long range (11-15 squares).  If the
Autocannon shoots through the enemy’s shields and does damage, two
12-sided dice are rolled to determine the damage.  Higher damage
amounts are treated as critical hits.  The attacker rolls a d12 to
determine the effect of the critical hit:

A
critical hit of “1″ is a kill and takes the Meck out of the match.
 Critical hits of 5 or 7 take a weapon offline.  Take both a Meck’s
weapons out and that’s considered a “weapons kill”.  Critical hits of 9
and 11 take out a Meck’s legs, scoring a “movement kill”.   Each kill
allows the attacker to gain a “battle honor” which improves the Meck’s
abilities, including speed increases, extra command points, better
to-hit abilities, increased damage, and better armor.

In
addition to the Jumper, each player also controls two Spartans.  One
Spartan features two Twin Lasers.  The other features two Rocket Pods,
each of which fires 3 rockets.  

Each
player also controls two Runners.  Runners have the most movement
points and 3 separate weapons.  Runners are the weakest of the 3 unit
types in terms of their ability to take damage, but have the effective
Static Charge weapon which can cause considerable damage at melee range
due to the ease with which it hits other targets.

Injurius Games is played on a tabletop with terrain pieces such as the one below from this year’s Origins:

Or this one, used for a scenario version of the game:

This is a relatively inexpensive game to get into.  As you can see from the price list on the Red Shirt Games site,
you can pick up the rule book for $20 and miniatures relatively
cheaply.  They even offer sets for $40 with a rule book and enough
miniatures to get started immediately.

As I said, I’ve played
this game for the last several years, and specifically the “keep what
you kill” variant played at Origins.  I usually manage to take home a
few miniatures and have fun winning them.  The Red Shirt team at
Origins always seems to do a good job running their games and keeping
things both fair and interesting.

If you encounter the Red
Shirts and Injurius Games at a convention you attend, I definitely
recommend checking out the game to see what you think.