I'm not sorry. We had it coming.
- 'Tech Noir', GUNSHIP
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| look at this insane detail on one of Mangs's survivors |
My regular opponent and now game designer Little Mangs of War has been working on a miniatures- and setting-agnostic ruleset, currently dubbed 'Blade and Rifle' while in development. Originally intended as survivors vs AI zombies, he's started playing around with matched play rules. I offered to help him playtest a match a few weeks ago (Sunday 3 August, for those of you tracking how long it takes me to write up after action reports). I only had to bring my own pudgy body; he provided miniatures, terrain, dice (although I did bring my dice and tape measure) and the ALPHA_1 set of the rules.
The rules themselves are a little more complex than, say, Mordheim, but less complex than, say, Infinity. They are incredibly lethal, though, which makes cover essential - Mangs completely coated the board in bushes, abandoned cars, trees, and fences and I think the game would utterly fail to work with any less terrain.
Models roll to climb or shoot/fight, with number of successes counted. Certain actions need certain numbers of successes to work, but failures don't cancel them out. Sometimes fail means increased fatigue or other resources on the sheet are spent; sometimes they mean that the action is 'wasted'. Running or sprinting has other costs as well, such as limiting turning; overwatching holds your action but if nothing then crosses your line of fire, the effect is wasted.
I enjoyed the rules once we got into them, with a few suggestions added (if you run, you should be able to attempt to leap fences or cross small gaps, but with a test - parkour! - or additional penalties ensue). Once we got into it, the rules became smooth and easy to understand.
Each model got a little sheet. Feedback from me and a few others in our small group has suggested further improvements there - A5 is easier to manage than A4, for instance. Each model is assigned a card from a deck, which is drawn for initiative. This is fun and easy, but meaning that you can't control who necessarily acts in a given moment (like in Bolt Action or Infinity). This gives a feeling of random folks thrown together rather than militaristic discipline, which I like for this game.
Some of my survivors enter the suburbs here. On a 6x4' board, there will be a lot of walking (4") to get to where we're going, but we need to hug cover - weapons have no range limits, just bonuses at closer ranges.
Mangs's guys take up early positions.
Marcel here failed his climb check first turn.
Jade dashes into cover. Dashing is an action that moves you at speed pretty reliably.
Rachel here sprints along the board edge, trusting that nobody has eyes on her. Sprinting gives you a great bonus to your movement, with a chance to lose Fatigue resource points if you roll poorly on a Vitality check. (I think it's Vitality. I'm sure Mangs will correct my many errors.)
Sticking to cover.
Short climbs don't require skill checks, but you can't run over them - so no sliding across the roof of a car as you sprint - unless parkour makes it into the game! (hint)
Panting, Rachel runs into the bushes. While Mangs has based his bushes on area bases, the game uses True Line of Sight, so the base means nothing here. I usually dislike True LoS - it's a miniatures game, you can't be that precise - but when playing this granularly and on a board this dense, it does work.
Jade takes cover behind the abandoned pig transport.
Couple shots of Mangs's guys moving up. At this point, we'd had a couple of turns of pure manoeuvre. This might be slow-paced for some, but it let me get into the mechanics of skill checks. I think once players get the hang of it, these turns would go very rapidly indeed. Or just play on a 4x4 '.
Crystal reaches a barricade but saves a reaction to interrupt - so if I interact with her in some way, she'll get a counter-action.
Marcel finally climbs to the top of the tower. He will drop prone on my next turn and oversight the objective for the whole game - which actually isn't that effective in the end.
Speaking of which, that little wooden box is the objective. We have to get it, pick it up, and get it off a board edge. Rations or geiger counters or vaccines - who knows what the crate contains, but we gotta get it!
I think I got my notes confused - I have here that Marcel hides between the cars, but Marcel's the guy in my backzone! Anyway, this guy nestles in between the cars, hoping to dash for the crate when he can. Notice one of Mangs's guys creeping up the garden wall in the background.
Rachel goes for the bushes and takes a shot at Marty with her shotgun - it spatters against the concrete.
Duke dashes for the box. He has to go into the open to do it, but you don't win without risks -- and Duke sucks, so I don't care if he dies. Sorry, pal.
Boiler shoots Duke and lands a clean hit - but it goes through his rucksack and doesn't hurt him at all! (Boiler got a clean hit, but the dice roll for effect landed on an incredbily lucky 'no damage' roll. Duke still takes a bunch of pinning dice though - you take more for successful hits on you, even if you get lucky.)
Marcel or whoever that is in the cars shoots back at Boiler, gunning him down like a dog (instant kill - no, not KO, a dice roll that indicates he is just straight-up dead. Guns are terrifying in this! Duke should not be out there!!)
This was a complex sequence. One of Mangs's guys got into base with mine, but I had a reaction still. So in the end, I shot her at point blank range. If she had gotten luckier though, she would have cleaned me up.
Melee slap fight with no successful damage.
Jade left herself exposed while trying to flank...
Crystal strafes and kills Marcel, who missed his reactive snap shot. Good positioning from Mangs.
I guess this guy isn't Marcel after all and honestly, what a hopeless photograph. God. Anyway, he does have eyes on the objective zone. Honest.
Bethy goes Rachel and gets badly hurt. The next turn, she takes her down in a nasty knife fight. Tyler had taken a nearly impossible shot and injured Crystal but the next shot, she reacted and got around the fire truck.
The whole time these other fights had been going on, Duke had been fuckin' booking it with the package - and he gets away. There's another fight I don't have photos of, up by the garden wall. Sorry!
Mangs's rules-as-drafted have any injured folks on the board at game close in very serious trouble, to encourage players not to fight to the death, but I think I convinced him to tone those down. They can result in really feels-bad moments - for example, imagine that Crystal who was standing next to her friend with bandages couldn't save her friend.
Mangs is also revising the points-buy rules, so next time I might design my own folks. He has quite specific rules for firearms, while I couldn't give a damn about the difference between a Beretta and a Desert Eagle, so I'm not sure if I could use some of my hive gangers in some kind of grim future version of the rules. Maybe we'll play some more with his miniatures - aren't they great?
Anyway, this was fun as hell. I'm sure we'll play more. There's nothing really like playing with fully painted miniatures on good terrain. Doesn't hurt that I won.
