"But The Responsible One," I hear you metaphorically ask, "wasn't your last League game against JSA?"
It was indeed, but it seems there's quite a few people who've signed up to play JSA in the new League, so there will be a few games with them!
This time around, it was a game of Frontline, and my experience with this so far is that the ability to move zones in the second turn is really strong. So, when I won the Lieutenant roll I chose deployment sides, and made my opponent set up first. I had taken the Armand profile with Minelayer in the list too, so I was hoping, by holding him back, to increase the risk of deploying a mine somewhere really inconvenient for a ninja.
As it was, I was little unlucky and Shinobu had deployed to counter the Druze link team. My sniper got a shot off as she approached, but she managed to win the face to face and while I passed my armour rolls, the Brawler failed their guts check and ducked prone, leaving the back of the team exposed.
What followed was several members of the link getting killed one by one with careful placement of smoke and so forth. The game then got even more involved and exciting and I forgot to take photos of the latter stages, so I'm going to keep the description out of line with the remaining photos of the early stages to break things up a bit.
My MSV2 Sniper shamefacedly came down from their perch to deal with Shinobu, manoeuvring to shoot her in the back. Seeing what was coming, she changed facing to face off against the sniper, but I then took the opportunity to have my Lieutenant run up behind her and shotgun her in the back. Unfortunately, I didn't quite have the orders to get her back into cover. I used my Hunzakut in the midfield to speculative fire a grenade to clear out some of the threats there, and managed to get rid of a Ryuken Unit-9 at least.
My opponent then manage to move his Lu Duan to see the Lieutenant and gun her down, leaving me in Loss of Lieutenant for the second turn. My Hunzakut managed to lay a mine to take out the Lu Duan, but the damage was done.
Armand had been locking down most of the JSA advance with a commanding view of the field from a tower on the left. The first plan required a Keisotsu to run and clear out a Warcor to make space for a Kempeitai with MSV2 to get rid of him, but they ran into a hidden Saito Togan. Armand's luck eventually ran out and he took a wound from a carefully placed mine, losing his Symbiont armour and ducking prone into cover.
A quite terrifying amount of JSA then advanced into the midfield, taking out Saito and re-syncing the Xenotech with the Lieutenant order, failing to place the Multiscanner marker with the very last order.
I had a handful of orders left and had a hard choice to make. I could try and kill a lot of things in the centre and try and claim the centre, or I could try and push forward to the far zone, gaining the far zone for the win - but I wasn't sure how far I'd have to go to get that zone, and the models left who could do it were very vulnerable to crits.
I decided to go for the centre zone. One at a time, I engaged models in the centre with my Druze Killer Hacker, and even my new Lieutenant, a Brawler Doctor with a rifle. The Brawler Sniper managed to draw a long diagonal line on a Ryuken-9... Every order and every shot was a kill, taking out five models worth around a hundred points, swinging the game from JSA to me. In the end, it was a 6-0 win to me, but in reality it was a lot closer - the last turn could have fallen apart with one unlucky roll, as I was definitely on the back foot. It was a really good fun game, and a good challenge for both of us.
