War In Space (Pt 3): Set Up and Turns

SET-UP: Set up forces/terrain and assign starting speed markers per scenario, GM (if any) guidance, or player agreement.  I usually just have all ships start at speed 3.  Alternatively, starting speed can be determined by rolling one Turn Die (Table 1) per ship.  Each player should have their own deck of standard playing cards with the two Jokers included.  Shuffle the decks thoroughly and have the player to the right cut.
   
THE TURN SEQUENCE: Each turn starts with the Draw Phase, followed by the Targeting phase, the Energy Allocation Phase, the Weapons Fire Phase, the Movement Phase, the Damage Control Phase and concludes with the Clean-Up Phase.
Draw Phase: Although players have an omniscient view of the battlefield, starship captains do not.  The commander of each vessel must issue his orders based on the limited tactical picture painted by sensors scanning vast sectors of interstellar space.  This fog and friction of space war is simulated by limiting the number of cards each player can use to issue orders.  Each player has a standard deck of cards (with Jokers) from which they draw a number of cards per ship based on each ship’s respective experience.  Cards are drawn for each ship individually: ships may not share cards.  Each ship gets two cards for each experience level.  Thus an Untested crew would get two cards and a Legendary ship gets 10.  Players look through the drawn cards to see what options each ship has this turn, but do not have to decide what card to use yet.  Place drawn cards face down on their respective SDS.
Targeting Phase: The player controlling the ship with the least experienced crew must declare that ship’s target(s), if any, first.  If all opponents each have ships with equally low experience levels, the player with the most ships goes first.  If all players are tied in both experience levels and numbers of craft, simply roll dice to determine who goes first.  Players then alternate declaring targets.  A player’s lower experience ships must declare targets before his higher experience ships.  When a ship declares a target, place a beam weapon or seeking weapon marker, as appropriate, on the ship’s hex-side facing the target.  I use thick spaghetti painted with bright red, blue, and green acrylic paint and broken into various lengths for my beam weapon markers.  Each side gets different colored spaghetti making it easy to discriminate who is shooting at whom.  If a player decides to forgo shooting (in order for example to charge a heavy weapon), he does not have to declare why; he simply declares “pass” for that ship.

Next: Energy Allocation!