Against all odds, I wound up playing some Full Thrust this past weekend.  And to make it even cooler, Christy AND Jake played with me!  That's right, Jake's first miniatures game.

Christy and Jake were on one team, and I was on the other.  We each had two light cruisers and three frigates.  Although I won the game ultimately, Jake dealt out some punishing fire, resulting in the loss of both of my cruisers.  In Full Thrust, you roll a number of dice to attack, with the number depending on the range and size of the guns.  If you get a 4 or 5, you do 1 point of damage, and a 6 does two.  But even more damaging, the 6 lets you re-roll!  Jake scored a cascade of 3 6's in a row.

Damage is tracked in this little grid of boxes.  Each time you fill up a row with damage, you have to roll "Damage Report" checks for all of your major systems (turrets, drives, etc.) to see if they have been knocked off-line.  I did a little "role playing" with that part, and what I originally thought would be one of the more tiresome parts of the game turned out to be one of the most exciting.

The basic flow of the game is that everyone writes orders for their ships' movement, then everyone moves all of the ships.  After that, you roll for initiative and trade off taking shots at each other ship by ship, applying the damage immediately.  Jake didn't quite appreciate that the maneuver phase was as important as the firing phase, but at least he was relatively patient waiting to "start the game up again". :-)

Before we knew it, an hour and a half had passed.  Jake took losing fairly well, though he's still pretty upset by things like that.  He did take solace in the fact that he was a master gunner, rolling high dice like nobody's business.

Both Jake and Christy are amenable to more FT playing, so we may have found a new family game for a while.  Now if only Penelope would stop running away with the dice....