First Flight in Brooklyn!

My friends and I got together this weekend to try this game for the first time and in short, we had an absolute blast. Eight of us (5 guys/3 women) descended on my buddies apartment in Brooklyn in a variety of period costumes (we had TOS, TNG, even someone who dressed as a BSG viper pilot for complex reasons) where he and his g/f had very graciously decided to host. The game was run, no mods, on a decent little media center PC on a main 42" plasma and seats/couches were arranged so that all positions could easily see the main viewer, and each had either a laptop or an iPad to control their station. Over the course of about seven hours, we drank bottles of wine, enjoyed delicious food and snacks, and survived the enemy onslaught more times than we failed, each time moving the difficulty up a notch or two. Mission report as follows:

First Flight: Capt Brian - Mission Success. All Enemies Destroyed
Second Flight: Capt Fletch - Mission Failure. Ship and crew flown directly into an anomaly the helmsman didn't see. Ship destroyed, crew lost.
Third Flight: Capt Nicole - Mission Failure. Ship and all friendly starbases destroyed by enemy armada.
Fourth Flight: Capt Brendan - Mission Success. All enemy ships destroyed with only a slight nuking of our own starbases. They needed new paint anyway.
Fifth Flight: Capt Kelly - Mission Success. All enemy ships destroyed and or crashed into accidentally.
Sixth Flight: Capt Fletch - Mission Success. Large enemy force of 50 plus ships destroyed without any loss of Starbases.

All flights were in invasion mode, with a "very interesting" system layout, starting at diff 1 and ending at diff 6, using a battleship, missile cruiser, light cruiser and dreadnought. It was hilarious.

On the technical side of things, we had stations drop a few times during games but generally this was resolved with a client relaunch or an iPad restart. Occasionally we had a tiny bit of station lag, but nothing excessive considering we had 8-10 wifi connected devices. Beyond that, everything worked flawlessly.

We went with rotating positions and command, which really lead to a lot of hilariousness - some of our guys were very aggressive, some were more interested in completing missions ferrying between starbases and transport ships. We finally broke things up around 1am after all the booze was had and we were all delirious from the fun of things. It was really the best of a video game and the best of a table top game combined - you had the shared fantasy, the collaborative efforts, the stations working together and the sense of shared accomplishment. Our friends and I are already planning another gathering.

Get some friends together, get some drinks, stay loose, fly around, have fun. This is a great experience and we hope everybody else has a good time as well.

This is a crosspost from /r/Artemis on Reddit.