Mongoose is of course not the first game company to ford the treacherous rapids of a Babylon 5 game license; the now-defunct Chameleon Eclectic kicked things off with The Babylon Project (generally---if perhaps unfairly---agreed by many learned commentators to have the worst game art in Christendom), but they folded after releasing only the core rulebook, a GM's Screen, and The Earthforce Sourcebook, which also contained the setting's first (of many) space combat system.
CE was followed by Agents of Gaming, who released not one, but three Babylon 5-themed wargames: the definitive Babylon 5 Wars (a title unfortunately derivative of Starfleet Battles, which I'm told the game resembled to a certain extent), the less-popular but larger-scale Fleet Action game, and the ground-battle-oriented GROPOS which produced some really cool-looking miniatures but never really caught on. Unfortunately, AoG lost their license in 2003, and they too folded abruptly.
This brings us to Mongoose. In 2003, they released their own D20-system Babylon 5 RPG, the Babylon 5 Roleplaying Game and Fact Book, and were able to maintain momentum (hey, alliteration!) with a pretty steady flow of sourcebooks. Of course, you can't release a Babylon 5 game without trying to make a starship tactical combat simulator, so ACtA was born. How is it?
The box itself is really, really nice. You'd have to pay a lot more than $50 to get a box as nice as this one, let me tell you. It's a big box, similar in size and construction to the old Planescape boxed sets from TSR. The cover art is pretty nicely done as well, with an Omega Destroyer firing a laser beam at an evading White Star. It's nice, professional-grade stuff; it looks easily as good as or better than the graphics used on the actual series. Just looking at the box alone, I was pretty excited.
When I opened it, it was another matter. Inside this huge, sturdy box, there two booklets (the rules booklet, weighing in at 48 pages, and the fleet lists, 96 pages), both staple-bound. Also included were a whole mess of cardboard counters to represent ships. The counters themselves (and there are a lot of them) aren't amazingly sturdy, but they're nicely made and separate from their countersheets easily enough.
I'll say this here; I really like the fact that Mongoose, while making what is ostensibly a miniatures game a la Battlefleet Gothic, has made it so that you can field an enormous fleet right from the get-go using just what's in the box. It's a pretty classy move on their part, and I'm all for it.
The rules pamphlet (and it practically is---although the cover is nice and sturdy and all the pages have stayed in so far, despite traveling around in a satchel full of dice for a week) is in black and white, with example illustrations of movement and set-up.
There are no dice included. That's right, no dice. None. $50=2 pamphlets+15 countersheets+nice box. It's not like the game doesn't need them, either. There'll be times when players will have to roll ten or more d6 at once.
The rules themselves are fairly simple and easy to grasp; after I skimmed the book twice, I knew practically all I needed to know about how the game worked. As I said, it's somewhat similar to Battlefleet Gothic.
The players dice to determine initiative, with the winner determining who moves first. The players then alternate moving a ship each until they run out, at which point they do the same for their fighter flights.
Each ship has a small stat block that tells how far it moves in a turn (in inches), how many turns it can make in a turn (I hated writing that, I really did), the strength of its armor, how much damage it can take, how many crew points it has, if it carries any flights of fighters, and what special equipment it carries (like a jump engine, or interceptor batteries). Other factors, such as crew quality, can affect the performance of the vessel as well, primarily by determining how easy it is for them to carry out special orders, which enable the ship to move faster or jump to hyperspace, etc.
Instead of pointing each ship out with a specific point cost, Mongoose (in the form of game designer Matthew Sprange) has done something quite clever. ACtA has five priority levels for battles (in ascending order of value): Patrol, Skirmish, Raid, Battle, and War. When a scenario is selected for play the players decide by one means or another what the priority level will be, and how many Fleet Allocation points they'll have (typically 5). Each point will buy one ship of the scenario's priority level, but it can also buy multiple ships of lower priorities or be combined with other points to buy ships of a higher priority level. Pretty neat, huh?
Along with ships, there are fighters; each flight is represented by a single counter with an armor rating just like any ship; one hit from any weapon, however, will automatically kill a fighter. To prevent the wholesale slaughter of swarms of fighters, each flight has a dodge score (2+, 3+, etc), which is the number that must be rolled on a d6 to evade any hit scored on the flight. Some weapons (with the "Anti-Fighter" trait) negate this save, but they're typically short ranged, allowing fighters to close for combat quite readily. Fighter weapons themselves are treated exactly like the weapons on their larger counterparts; curiously, none of them have the "anti-fighter" trait. Instead, fighter flights can close to base-to-base contact and roll a d6, adding their crew quality score to the roll; the highest score wins and eliminates the opposing flight, no dodge roll possible.
At their most basic level, weapons are represented by a name ("Heavy Pulse Cannons", "Particle Beams", "Neutron Laser", etc.), a range, a firing arc, and a number of Attack Dice (always the trusty d6). Each weapons system usually represents an abstraction of several weapon mounts, and combat is handled like this:
Say a Tethys Patrol Cutter decides to fire its forward medium pulse cannon (range of 10", 4 AD) at another Patrol Cutter (Armor Rating 4). The attacking player would roll his 4 Attack Dice and discard any that came up under a three. Anything else is a hit. Ignoring things like interceptor batteries for simplicity's sake, the attacker then rolls 2d6 for each hit. If they come up less than 5, nothing happens, and the shot failed to damage. If they come up from 5-9, the target takes one point of damage and looses one point of crew. If the roll is a ten or up, there's been a critical hit, with the possibility for extra damage or crew loss or both, as well as the failure of various important systems.
There are various special attributes for weapons, from double or triple damage (which always do at least one point of damage if they hit, and multiply the ordinary damage inflicted), to Accurate (the weapon automatically hits the target), to Beam, probably the most important special attribute. Beam attacks represent powerful weapons like heavy lasers or Shadow slicer beams that can inflict serious damage to targets by simply shearing off portions of the ship. When a beam weapon hits its target, it gets to roll again, treating the armor rating as being one point higher. If it hits again, it gets to roll again, and so on, with the target number going up by one each time (to prevent beams being totally useless, a roll of 6 auto-hits, no matter the target number). Usually, beam weapons have only a very few AD, but typically have the Double or Triple Damage Traits and other penetration aids.
That's pretty much the rules, right there. The designers have added a number of special mission types (all very similar to players of Warhammer 40,000, even down to the set-up diagrams...I wonder if it's a British thing?) and a rudimentary campaign system that looks pretty fun, if not really very in-depth.
The Fleet Book is somewhat longer and in glorious, if somewhat ill-used full-colour. It covers fleet lists for the Earth Alliance, the Minbari Federation, the Centauri Republic, the Narn Regime, the League of Non-Aligned Worlds, the Interstellar Alliance, the Vorlons, the Shadows, and civilian and pirate craft.
The Fleet Book has a picture of nearly every ship in it; sometimes these are pretty good-looking CGI pieces, and sometimes, you wonder why they even bothered, since it looks like they just took old Agents of Gaming line drawings, blew them up to full size, and used MS Paint to color them. The worst victim of this is the Narn Thentus frigate, which is colored this horrible garish neon-green-and-tie-dyed pattern like a 1968 Volkswagen Bus. It's really atrocious, like something out of an eight-year-old Geocities homepage. There are other illustrations that are pretty crappy, but the Thentus is their king. It's especially painful to see them next to the really good looking CGI renderings of many of the other ships in the book.
Other than that, the fleet book is pretty workmanlike and well-done. It covers most of the major ships from the show and the old Babylon 5 Wars game, including all the big names, like the Omega, the Victory, the White Star, the Warlock, and all the rest.
There are some problems, though. The White Star, for instance, has a lower crew rating that it does a hull rating, which means that after most battles, there'll be a bunch of empty White Stars littering the field like pop cans with a hole in the bottom. This was borne out in playtest, where several of the little devils were left almost untouched externally thanks to their adaptive armor, but their crew berths had been scooped out like Halloween pumpkins. There is apparently a fix underway for this, due out in a supplement, but really, shouldn't someone have noticed this beforehand? Likewise, the Shadows, and the Vorlons especially, are powerless before the younger races' fighters, lacking any antifighter weapons, and in the case of the Vorlons, having no fighters of their own. Presumably an expanded fleet list is scheduled for every navy, but until then, don't expect to see too many Vorlon fleets plying the card tables of our galaxy.
In terms of playability, the game is, as I mentioned, easy to learn, and I was able to teach another player the rudiments of the system within a single turn of a fairly large and complex battle, to the point where he then kicked my ass in the following turns, which is not how it's supposed to work. In the heat of things, we disregarded a few rules (the increased difficulty for successive beam weapon hits, primarily, which sped things up a little), but all-in-all the game plays quickly and easily; unlike the more detailed Babylon 5 Wars, where a large battle would take all day, battles with as many as ten capital ships can take only an hour or two, albeit at the price of greatly reduced detail.
ACtA is a fun game, but it's also a financial monster. The boxed set alone is pretty pricey for what you get, and the upcoming fleet boxed sets (which also contain the expanded fleet lists for their respective factions) retail at right around a hundred dollars. If you already have one of the previous Babylon 5 space combat games (as I do), you may not find ACtA worth your while for the price. But if you don't, or if you want a quicker-playing game with a little less exhaustive detail, it might be worth a look. Hardcore fans of the series and its affiliated products, of course, will probably find A Call To Arms irresistible at any price.
