Last year I got really excited for a table-top war game that I wanted to play, one that had really brilliantly written rules and some of my favorite minis to paint. A friend of mine was suspicious about the company, and I promised that if my friend was right, I would abandon that game completely and write my own war game FROM SCRATCH.

So… turns out? That game’s community Discord? Is a Nazi bar. The company? Supports the work of a man who’s real sad the Confederacy lost. Then they hired a lead writer who manages an extreme far right Facebook group used to stalk, harass, dox, and SWAT minorities they don’t like. So, uh, not supporting that anymore.

In fairness to my friend, I did not follow through on that promise initially. Instead, I got hyped for the Firestorm: Armada relaunch that was in the works. Until I found out that company hired an extremely toxic and vitriolic transphobe to write their full reboot of the lore. I’m not putting up with that, hell no.

War games are for everybody. So here I am, fulfilling my promise and making a game that everyone knows from word one is for them. Not exactly original of me, given that Stardust, the excellent starfighter combat game by the extremely talented team at Sublight Games exists. But I’m doing it anyway. That said, Stardust has a trans protagonist front and center in their narrative and promotional materials! Are you queer or lesbian and an Ace Combat fan? Because if you are (and I have made-up statistics on my side), you should play Stardust.

Still, the thing that makes me happy is making things. I wanted to be a fan creator for an existing community, like I’ve done in the past. But I haven’t found a game that hits me the right way for that sort of creativity. So I’ll make my own.

This comes down to a few things, but I can break it down into the needs of mechanics, the needs of fluff/lore, and where those intersect.

Most recently, my neighbor who is in his 70s saw me painting BattleTech minis and now he wants to learn how to play war games. But god no, I’m not showing him BattleTech as his first game. That’s madness. So, #1, I need a wargame that’s straightforward enough that someone who’s never played a war game or RPG can learn it and play it.

In relation to this first point, I need a game where almost everything you need to know can be seen by looking at the table and that doesn’t require a copious number of markers. So we need to know everything from: (1) the model, (2) a d6 marker on or adjacent to the mini’s base, (3) no more than 1 or 2 types of tokens.

I’ve read a lot of wargames lately that don’t much distinguish between individual soldiers in a squad, because you’re moving a whole squad of 8 to 12 or so soldiers, treating all of them as statistically the same. But I don’t like that. I like it when your team has a specialist, like a medic, or a heavy weapons carrier. So I need a game that supports having special weapons and special abilities per infantry unit.

Fast play. I’m making this as an introduction to war games. The average person isn’t ready to sit and play one game for 5-6 hours. Even a lot of gamers can’t do that. “6-Hour” was the pejorative nickname that Twilight Imperium had with an old gaming group I was in back in college. So the game needs to resolve in 90 to 180 minutes. Resolving a game quickly means resolving actions quickly. Which is something BattleTech and many other games aren’t great at. BattleTech has you roll to hit (after calculating a formula for the target number) and then rolling on location tables. Other games often have a distinction between to-hit rolls and defensive rolls, or armor saves. That costs time. So I need a game that minimizes this.

Depth where you want it. One of BattleTech’s best features is the plethora of optional mechanics that develop the game as desired for scenarios, or gives players more to engage with where they want it. That’s fantastic. If I can build a set of mechanics that work from the word go on a simple system, but which can be seamlessly replaced with more complex systems? That’s a winner.

d6s. I don’t like it, but they’re the standard because they’re what everyone has access to and it’s easy to roll lots of them. If I could, I’d go for a d8 system. But that’d be a barrier to entry. That said? I also want dice to directly represent the individual weapons or soldiers or what have you. If you roll 1d6, I don’t want that being an abstracted assortment of 5 people firing pistols. 1 die needs to be no more than 1 person or vehicle making an attack. That doesn’t mean attacks can’t also be more than one die, but that’s my baseline.

I don’t like historical war games, because I want tanks but don’t want to be tied to real-world politics of the past or present. So I need an original setting with modern or sci-fi technology. I loved, and still miss playing, games like AT-43 that had a great focus on infantry and combined arms with support from light vehicles and power armor and things. So I want that: a mixed force of infantry supported by combat vehicles or ‘mechs.

Factions, factions, factions! People like variety and choice, and different factions in a war game (combined with army list choices) are how people express themselves in a wargame. That said, having rigid factions that restrict any sort of overlap in unit selection between forces reduces the amount of possible combinations. Meanwhile, BattleTech has the opposite problem: just about anybody can take any ‘Mech after some fashion or other, though with differing loadouts available. But that does give you a crazy amount of options. So, preferably, I should find a median route between these things. If there’s unit selection overlap, I can have more complex possible player options with fewer individual units.

The most important overlapping feature here? Infantry. I want modern or near future warfare which means I want infantry to be split up into fireteams. I also, mechanically, wanted specialists and special weapon carriers. On top of that, I want the fireteams to be understood on the table exclusively by their models and a limited number of tokens alone.

This is where we’re going to start building our mechanics: infantry. Once I have mechanics that work well for Infantry, I’ll expand those out and adapt them for use with vehicles.

I’ve created a whole laundry list of expectations and requirements for myself about what I want to see Infantry do, and those have made a lot of these choices easier. I want the smallest collection of soldiers that I move around a table to be a 3 to 6 person Fireteam. I also want d6s as my weapon of choice for resolving gameplay. So a Fireteam should be either: (1) a collection of 3 to 6 models (28mm) or (2) a single base representing a Fireteam with a d6 to count who’s left (10mm or 15mm). Of these, one will be a team leader, one will be a Specialist (optional), and one will have a Heavy Weapon (optional) with everyone else being standard for the unit’s type.

What do I mean when I say this is flexible? You can very easily run this at 10mm with just a d6 marker and abstract out who gets shot, or you can have a rigid hit location table BattleTech style in the more advanced rules. Or, if you want to run it with 28mm, you don’t need the d6 marker. Instead you use each model as an individual soldier and eliminate them in order of who’s closest to the attack (defender picks on a tie). This definitely achieves my goal of keeping as much knowledge visible and on the table as possible.

There’s a complicated and a simple system for this. For the simplified system, each soldier has a number assigned to it 1 through 6. Roll a d6 to attack and that’s who you hit. And, yes, that means units get harder to shoot as they lose people. I’m okay with that because it preserves some of their value during activation.

At smaller scales, you won’t be moving individual miniatures. You’ll have a single base representing your whole fireteam. In that case, you’ll need a d6 marker token to show how many soldiers are still alive in that fireteam. But, since we’re making these rules for the small scale, we can easily port them up to 28mm scale. Which means! You can absolutely field your fireteam as a single big, cool, show-off base with some action pose or diorama or whatever you like. COOL!

So how’s this work? The d6 shows how many soldiers are alive and also shows how easy it is to hit the fireteam with an attack. Now, this is a little counter-intuitive because it means low rolls hit and high rolls miss. Just think of it as high attack rolls go “over their heads.” Now, there are two things that I really want to reward infantry for: moving and taking cover. If an infantry unit moves? Attacks against it are at +1 to hit. If they have cover? Attacks are at another +1. In the event of to-hit bonuses, attack rolls with negative values wrap around (-1 is 1, -2 is 2, etc.) and a roll of 0 is attacker’s choice. It should never be impossible for an attack to hit, so a natural 1 on the d6 always

Remember how I said Armor/Defense rolls slowed down the game? NONE. Leave them out for infantry. When an attack roll is made, compare it to the number of units remaining in the squad (shown by the d6 marker). If that value is 4 and you rolled at least one 4? Reduce it by 1. Then repeat this for 3, 2, and 1. If you need tougher infantry, or “armored” infantry? It takes 2 hits to the same location to reduce the team size by 1.

For play abstracted at this level (meaning no sheet of paper tracking who is or isn’t alive in the fireteam), assume that the team leader is always killed last, the specialist (if there is one) 2nd to last, the heavy weapon bearer (if there is one) 2nd or 3rd to last depending on if the squad has a specialist. Always eliminate standard soldiers first. In more advanced play, you can track who gets shot separate from the team size.

Mostly the same as above, but with either the team leader always being assigned 1 or the model which is furthest away from the attacker being assigned 1 with each model as you get closer to the attacker being the next higher number. The benefit of having one model per soldier is if you are using an armor mechanic (taking more than one hit to kill), you can indicate a soldier has been hit this turn by tipping them over. That’s got a lot of appeal to me, and means I’ll probably try playing this at 28mm first. But… yeah. That’s really the only thing you’ve got to do different from the rules listed above. And, technically, you don’t even have to do that. But it is a way of doing location specific hits without having an assigned table, which keeps more info on the table and off the reference sheets.

So now we have a unit on the table, and we know how to resolve attacks aimed at it. That’s all well and good, but activating a single Fireteam seems potentially (depending on the scale of the game) a little weak if we consider that other units you might command include tanks or mechs. So, more likely, we’d want to see activation of whole squads (two fireteams) or sections (three fireteams). So a fireteam has to have a team leader, a corporal. If you’re dealing with one model per soldier, we’ll need a short command distance limitation that means individual models in that fireteam must be within a distance of the corporal.

Now, we also add a fireteam that has a Sergeant. That fireteam gets its own larger command distance that all fireteams under its command must be within for squad cohesion. For me, this is fun because it means you can have a single activation that has two or three separate entities (the fireteams) moving independently on the board for some purpose. I’ve yet to see that in a war game. All the ones I’ve read or played treat a whole squad of infantry as a single blob. There was one exception that had rules for moving a unit of light combat vehicles where a portion of them were recon vehicles that moved independently, and I liked that.

This is where all the customization would happen. I’m very much thinking about what I could do with a box of soldiers like I get from Wargames Atlantic for their Death Fields miniatures line. And in that, I get a variety of special weapons and officer options as well as one of two weapons for standard loadouts. What weapons soldiers carry is one of those things that can be complicated on the back-end because it can be pre-prepared for players and offered as static choices (complexity only as deep as desire, one of my design goals). So, from a pragmatic viewpoint, I want distinct rules for: Pistols, SMGs, Shotguns, Carbines, Rifles, Sniper Rifles, Squad Assault Weapons, Anti-Tank weapons, Grenades, and Flamethrowers.

Now, how do you diversify all of these weapons? There are a number of ways you can modify a weapon or its attack:

So let’s pencil in some WIP weapon stats to test out .

How did I come up with all these values? Ehhh… math.

These are still a bit rough, and will stay that way until I get a lot of play-testing in to see how the weapons vibe against each other. I’m still not sure if I’m weighting range heavily enough, and these values will inform the sort of “point cost” values I’ll settle on for force-building. But that’s many steps away from where I am now.

Good question. I don’t know yet. Isn’t game design fun? You just make stuff up, hope it works, and then frantically change it later. Right now, let’s assume that soldiers have 6 Equipment Slots, Special Weapons carriers have 8 Slots, and Vehicle Crews (if they come up at all) have 4 slots. Equipment packs for Specialists (like Medics) will use up slots as well, but I’m not touching Specialists until I have vehicles built out.

To play-test the rules we’ve got so far, we need stats for one Squad so that two players with two squads can go pew pew at each other and see how it works out. Sooo… Let’s make those.

Fireteam A has a Sergeant for its team leader with a Command (CMD) distance of 8”. That means at least one unit from Fireteam B must be within 8”. Each unit must be within 1” of another unit in its fireteam. For this example, I gave Fireteam A a Sergeant. But that’s flexible, especially if mixing things up. For example, doing one squad of 2x Fireteam As and the other squad with 2x Fireteam Bs. As long as one fireteam in each squad has a Sergeant, that’s fine.

For this early stage of play-testing, just roll off to see who goes first and alternate activating your squads (not your fireteams).

So there. That’s enough rules to fiddle about with a few fireteams on a table moving and flanking and shooting each other. It’s not in a very readable or usable format, because articles like these are mostly about me talking through my design process. So this is what I’m working on long-term right now, and the goal is a full playable game inspired by Command & Conquer or similar titles.

This was a lot more work than my usual articles, but the plan here is that I’ll keep doing around 2k-3k words a week of work on this rules set with other articles mixed in between, like reviews or fan materials for other systems.