Of escape pods and wargaming

Not the escape pod you're looking for (via Wookieepedia).

Recently* over at the excellent Super Galactic Dreadnought, Desert Scribe made a post about escape pods he made using swanky beads his wife gave to him. Even before I got a quarter of the way through the post, ideas were already flitting around my head, about prospective uses for escape pods in space-based wargaming. What if when ships are destroyed, their respective players have to roll to see whether or not any crew escaped. Maybe there could even be an option to have the crew abandon ship if the vessel is damaged badly enough. If the roll succeeds, the player then rolls to see how many pods make it on the board.

Then things get interesting. The pods are stationary and can be retrieved by either side. If the player rescues them, they gain points for each pod. Its the same if their opponent captures them. On the other hand, the enemy has the additional option of simply destroying the escape pods for points, although there should be some kind of roll involved to balance it out, otherwise, they’ll just blow the pods away every time. If a player does decide to snatch up the pods, the ship they send has its movement drop to the slowest speed, if not stopping altogether. If their ship has shields, they have to drop them and their field of fire is restricted due to escape pods floating around.

Another idea is that if you do rescue escape pods from one of your own ships, any crew lost on the rescuing ship can be replenished.

So, thoughts?

*Okay, so it’s been like two weeks since the post went up. I’m lazy, sue me.