And then he will attempt to wargame!

…they can get together a session now but it'll be a bit short, they usually have a weekly meetup and their next one a few days from now after lunch.

He doesn't want to interrupt their regular meeting with his amateurishness, a practice run now will solidify the contents of the rulebook. But of course if it's not convenient he can wait.

Reasonable. In that case Blai's Ubasti can fight these animate blood-drinking trees who mysteriously have terrible operational security and tend to leak explanations of their strategy.

Well that shouldn't be too hard then??

Ah, but will it really be that easy if they can sometimes heal by damaging his units and figuring out archer volleys is complicated?

It will if he can find this out by mysteriously easy intelligence gathering instead of empirically!

Well, the Ubasti have probably been in similar fights before and probably expected the vampiric regeneration in general terms.

Blai wins! His opponent offers him a handshake and says he's picking up the game pretty well.

"Is it - poor form - to attend to opsec more than that?"

"No, no. It's just there can be a lot of stuff happening in the game, so for your first time playing I wanted to be clear on what was going on and why."

"Oh, I see. I think it will be more interesting with more hidden information but if not all of it is supposed to be hidden that makes sense."

"In general, you're supposed to know what the units are in principle capable of, but not what your opponent wants to do with them at any given time, or how well-supplied they are, or such."

"That makes sense. Though sometimes you could introduce a new unit with surprise capabilities to simulate that situation."

"I'm not sure how you'd do that fairly."

"Well, you'd take turns at it, if nothing else."

"Could be fun but probably you should try the game as it was designed first."

"Oh, certainly."

Soon enough Blai has a painted plastic holy symbol to try.

This works, though he does still prefer the one he made with the tiny dagger and the gold wire.

That's fine, but it's good to have something that will definitely go through airport security.

As expected, Aegis Fantasy Tactics is more interesting when people aren't explaining all their strategic goals and Blai has to guess.

Yay! He is new to the game and does not know Earth military history lessons at all but he has done Approximately This professionally for twenty years.

He seems like the kind of person who is going to be busy when he gets to the mainland but there's a bunch of gaming groups there that he could join. …also one of the guys he's played against today thinks it'd be cool to support a real god, who's about good stuff and doesn't send people to hell or have petty interpersonal drama, does that mean he can wear an Iomedae symbol to help confuse potential bad actors at the airport? It would be kind of an Iomedan thing to do, right, take on a bit of personal risk in case of threats in order to protect someone?

It would be a fairly Iomedaean thing to do, yes, and Blai is willing to have him on wearing-a-holy-symbol duty if he wants to volunteer for this.

Great! There is, uh, no replacement Blai on the entire planet, which is a nerve-wracking state of affairs, really. Hopefully he won't chicken out.