Rogue Stars - 1 game

It's quite some time that i feel attracted by Osprey games.

Rules are usually well done and compact, and mostly, they are about skirmishes, which is what i like in this period.
I'm not a WH40K player, but i have some miniatures, (my first wargame box ever was a 40k, plus in time i bought some spare parts to play other games) so i figured out that Rogues Stars could be useful to play with those.

The game has a nice twist from the usual igougo system. One of the player gets the initiative, and can keep it till he decide to leave it, or until the opponent steal it from him. A band is composed of 3-6 figures.
Basically, every action a character does, make him(/her) a little more stressed, and getting strees he risk to fail activation. In that case, the opponent can either make a reaction (such as shooting at him, escape in cover etc etc) 

The rules give you also a great liberty in creating characters, and for this reason i soon forgot my 40k  figures and i created some new warbands using miniatures I had in my lead army (that is, the huge amount of miniatures taken forprojects never realized waiting for some use)
The first two are a band of predators and a band of pirates. I used some necromunda scenery i had stored away, and here comes the first game

The background in short : a group of pirates , while plundering an abandoned mining station, activated by mistake an artifact which had been stolen to the predators, The predators immediately arrived on the planet to deactivate it and bring it home, but they soon find out that they were not dealing with usual preys...
The game : the predators were attacking, their objective was to deactivate the ancient artifact (a blue stone in the center). Here are 3 of the 4 predators in their entry side

The pirates, with their Cyclop boss, had to defend the artifact, and possibly put out of action as many predators they could in order to steal their weapons, armours etc. (the beer behind the cyclop is actually not part of the game)

The predators started advancing trying to stay in cover as much as possible

Using reactions, the Pirates divided in 3 group, and advanced, the first group tried to position in view of the objective

the cylop went on the left, hoping to have a shot with his plasma cannon

the last one went on the right (or at least that was the intention, as actually only one succeded in activation

 after a lucky shot which put out of action a predator (mind , the pirates had excellent marksman skills) the fight went on the left, where we happily forgot the objective and started killing each other at point blank, but adding stress to stress,  activation was not so easy anymore

 The predator boss understood that he had been a little superficial thinking to add the skulls of these pirates in his trophy room before dinner

The other pirates advanced toward the fight, but they were shot down but a hidden predator

At the end, it was a close victory of the pirates but very few were still standing to celebrate

At the end it was a pleasant game, as it was our first time, we spend the first half of the game consulting tables, and we possibly forgot some steps here an there.
After a while, we started to learn the basics, and we could play without looking at the rules every one minute, but by then we were locked on the right in a fight at very close quarters.
One thing I did not like was the amount of counters on the table. to see the figures moving followed by 4-5 counters was not mice to see. In my next game, i will use characters cards (as there are so few of them) and counters will be placed on the cards