I spent the weekend down at the beach house with my brother's family, which includes my "gamer" nephew.

We played a couple of games of 5150, him with 6 "Halo" guys (Hard Body armor, Assault Rifles) and me with 6 Spugs (Soft body armor, "Shard Rifle" (bolt action)).  The first thing we decided was that the Spugs sucked. :-)  That's not entirely fair, they just needed to outnumber the Halo guys 2 or 3 to one to have a decent chance against those assault rifles.  In order to level the playing field some (I didn't have any extra figures with me), we added a "Spugnaught" (sort of a mini-mech) and allowed the Spugs to use the Basic reaction chart.  Standard Spug reactions have them advancing like a horde of locusts, and means that a LOT of them will die.  The spugnaught went a long way towards evening the odds, and our last few games were much closer.

One of the more fun scenarios we played was a "salvage" scenario where we both were investigating a ruined base looking for unspecified "goodies".  We didn't start off mutually hostile, but once things got hairy, the plasma bolts began to fly. :-)  The setup was this - a number of crates were scattered around the ruins, and you had to open each one to see what was in it:  Alien(1-3), Nothing(4-5) or Something Good (6).  There were also two large shipping "trailer" boxes, which contained 1d6 crates.

Two standout moments from that game - My nephew found an alien who ate 2 of his guys before they killed it.  I opened one of those trailers and found 4 aliens (!) who ate 2 of my guys and one of his before getting gunned down.  The other half dozen or so aliens were blown away as soon as they appeared.

Oh yeah, and my nephew blew away my Spugnaught with a super-lucky shot right at the end.  Rats! :-)

(For the purist 5150 players out there - yeah, an assault rifle can't actually hurt a BTA, but in this case, I gave him an impact of 1 against my Spugnaut to keep the game going.)

The other game we tried out was Warmachine, by Privateer Press.  I've studied up on the game some, but never actually tried to play it before these two games, and of course my Nephew had never even heard of it.  We played a pretty boring scenario (empty table, 24 inches apart, GO!), and while the game has promise, I want to try to play it a little closer to the rules (to keep his interest, I relaxed a lot of the rules) and with some terrain before I make a final judgement.

I really like the PP models, especially in their new "Hordes" game, so I want to like the rules, but it really is hard to play any game other than THW games after you've gotten into the reaction mechanism.