Been a while since I acquired this so, in a spare hour or so, I finally got around to the restoration job!
Red Alert is a Richard Borg designed Command and Colours game that was produced in conjunction with the Plastic Soldier Company. I recall seeing this being demonstrated by Dan Mersey at Salute some years ago - I have a picture on an earlier blog post - and remember thinking “This looks like a LOT of fun!”.
Anyways, fast forward to a couple of years ago I went all out for the base game and all the expansions as a long term project idea. Fast forward again to last year and I spotted on Facebook that someone was selling a painted copy of the base game for a price that was difficult to resist and so I didn’t!
The painted version was not without a few issues. To begin with it is missing a few counters (nothing major, they are of the marker variety main that there are plenty of them) and the ‘terrain’ overlays - planets and similar. Also, around a third of the painted models were in various states of disassembly - mainly off their bases but more significantly, the supporting poles on a fair few have broken off with the central spigot still glued in the locating hole on the underside. Nothing that a couple of hours with a file and a small drill could not fix though - and that is what I did whilst the protective sealer on the ironclads and aerial bases was drying.
The game itself includes 92 plastic ships ranging from battleships down to fighters. These are moulded in green and red for either side - each side has a different design of starship - and have been painted in these colours. The paint job is not bad but is a little ragged around the edges and so in due course I will repaint them - along with the starships from my original set and the various expansions. I actually enjoy painting starships and remember having a lot of fun painting those for Battlefleet Gothic - the sadly defunct GW space battle game.
As befits a Command and Colours game the action takes place on a 13 x 11 hexed star field cloth which will obviously be used for other space type games. The game uses command cards (60 of them) and combat cards (50 of these) and all the usual starship type ‘chrome’ features - cloaking devices, asteroid fields and the ubiquitous “Red Alert” of the title. In the game a “Red Alert” is a combat dice roll result, similar to a ‘Flag’ and represents the usual starship-in-combat-dramas - collateral damage, shields down, warp core breach, engineering issues (all usually accompanied by dramatic music and film quotes!). The usual Combat and Colours use of symbols on a cube for combat is also present. A nice idea is the use of Star Tokens. These can be used or retained for special situations as well as being the cost to use certain tactic cards - they are described as being the fuel for special actions so need to be used to best effect.
The two forces in the game are described as the Confederation and the Commonwealth - there is no detailed background history per se, just a summary of how the two forces came into being and featuring some of their ‘historical’ engagements as scenarios.
So far I have fixed the red fleet - by far the worst affected of the two - meaning that the greens are next. The game, missing parts notwithstanding (all the models are present though), will then be ready to roll. Again, this will be handy to have available straight out of the box.
Next though, will be the undercoating required on the ironclads and aerial bases.
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