I’m just going to keep buying and reading books from Osprey Wargames because, genuinely, they’re all worth a read so far. Every one of them is written with care and expertise, and have either novel game concepts or refreshing game mechanics. And, as always, I’m going to include some fan-made content for this game as well. I made this blog so I could share stuff I make, and I love making content to support games, so I’m never going to stop doing that. Pointy Hat Studios on YouTube being my inspiration to keep making free gaming supplements. That said, this weeks gaming supplement has spiraled into a project large enough to merit its own article. Look forward to that next week!

So what is the game? it’s a miniatures agnostic war game with comprehensive rules for DIY stats for your own infantry and vehicles. So, obviously, I’m already a fan. I love it when games include rules to help you custom-make your own forces, factions, or units. Xenos Rampant is designed to play relatively quickly, to have a focus and emphasis on infantry with limited combat vehicle support, and to provide a structure for campaign play.

Oh wow. Okay, so there’s a LOT of good. Right from the start, let’s talk flexibility and accessibility. Then talk Commanders and Detachment building. After that? Scenarios and campaign rules plus all the example settings.

The rules are very open and flexible to how you can field your miniatures: what scale, what types of bases, whether they’re one or more miniatures to a base, etc. They support 15mm and 28mm. They promote you using whatever bases your minis are already on. They encourage using multi-figure bases to speed up movement of infantry on the board. If you and a friend play two different war games at the same scale? You can field your armies against each other with this game.

Something I love from fiction (and, I suppose, technically, from history as well) is how the best stories come out of how one commander responds to and predicts their opposing force based on some familiarity with who their commander is. Xenos Rampant supports some of that by making your commander have a personality that affects how you play your force! Commanders draw from Aggressive, Tactical, Strategic, or Warlord traits. From there, you can select randomly from 6 traits. Some are positive, some are negative, and these can be changed or added to over the course of a campaign.

A Detachment is, typically, 24 points worth of infantry and a few combat vehicles. This consists of a collection of units that cost between 1 and 6 points (plus the cost of any optional upgrades to those units). To get the flavor and feel of distinct unit types, they’ve made categories of units that have specific in-built abilities and lists of optional upgrades specific to each category.

Those categories are Elite Infantry, Heavy Infantry, Light Infantry, Berserk Infantry, Support Infantry, Recon Infantry, Primitive Infantry, Militia Rabble, Greater Xenomorphs, Lesser Xenomorphs, Fighting Vehicles, Transport Vehicles, and Soft-Skin vehicles. You can further customize any of these by giving them Xeno Abilities, which are like the category-based optional upgrades but often a little more expensive. And I love this breakdown and how it incentivizes you to build some flavor into each of your units.

Right from the first step, when you’re selecting your Commander’s personality trait, your force has set itself up to be usable in campaign play. Xenos Rampant considered how campaign rules would impact its gameplay from the first moment, and I do think that’s important.

Campaigns involve following the actions of a commander and their Detachment, and allow you to earn Career Points to upgrade or improve your Commander or expand your Detachment. But Career Points also function as a sort of metric of how healthy your Commander’s career is. Losing battles costs you Career Points, so they also serve as a health pool to prevent your commander from being removed from command. That means spending them is also a risk/reward mechanic. That’s neat!

And, since the game uses Scenarios rather than a last-man standing win condition, Commanders are likely to survive multiple games. Xenos Rampant comes with 12 scenarios: Sweep and Clear, Secret Mission, Convoy Ambush, Ceasefire, Orbital Drop, Bottleneck, Fighting Retreat, Night Raid, Diversion, Recovery Detail, VIP Extraction, and Last Stand. All of these have scoring for VP and rewards for use with the Campaign system! Secret Mission is a personal favorite of mine, where the Defender doesn’t know what the Attacker needs to do to win. Love that.

All right… not everything in Xenos Rampant was a home run with me. But everything I don’t like is there for a good reason. So I’m going to present my dislikes along with what those features give Xenos Rampant the ability to do. One, I don’t exactly like how the rules abstraction works for infantry units. Two, I don’t like how the Campaign Rewards structure works.

All units work off of a hit point system called Strength Points. Every unit has 5, 10, or (rarely) 15 Strength. Attacks and Morale effects can lower Strength. You can represent unit Strength on the table with either a die tracking it or just the model count. So a 10 Strength infantry unit could have 10 models on the table. That sounds good!

Except the dice you roll don’t represent the models in your infantry unit. Huh? No. Instead, whenever you take an action you roll 10 dice independent of how many models are present in that unit. If the unit is at half or fewer Strength Points, it instead rolls 5 dice. This gives me a harsh disconnect between what I’m seeing on the table and what I’m using dice to resolve. If I have a 10-person squad, they roll 10 dice as long as there are at least 6 models on the table. Then, if they’re reduced to their final model? They still roll 5 dice.

This does give the designers a lot of useful functionality, though. Since they were already supporting a model agnostic system, and the design your own units rules let you represent any number of Strength Points with any number of models, there is (in practice) no necessity to tie dice rolled to Strength remaining. This also prevents a badly wounded unit from being nearly trivial to use during the game. And it works great for representing things like vehicles or giant monsters whom you would like to see retain that potency even while lightly injured. Plus, rolling consistent dice pools (5d6 or 10d6) has a lot of benefits in predicting game balance. I’ve worked a lot with d6s, and I understand what a nuisance it is to get nuanced results out of them at times. This is definitely a decision that does a lot of positive work for Xenos Rampant, and it helps keep down the number of dice you’re throwing each attack.

You know how in some older RTS games, they used to give you special abilities that powered up because you were winning? So the harder you were winning, the harder you would win? Yeah, that’s in here. Okay. So, there are two things going on here: Career Points and Campaign Rewards.

Career Points represent the overall health of your Commander’s career. You can spend these like you’re trading favors to add forces to your Detachment, to remove negative traits from your Commander, or to buy new upgraded abilities for said Commander. But if you go below 0 Career Points? You lose the Commander and have to roll up a new one. You earn Career Points by winning scenarios and lose them by losing scenarios. I expect you see the problem there already…

Now, Campaign Rewards? Are largely punitive to the loser.

The only Campaign Rewards on this table that don’t suck are the ones where you get to modify what scenario is rolled for the following game, or the one that lets you decide who gets to be the Attacker/Defender in the scenario rolled. The rest are a way to make the winner win harder in the following game. These penalties compound with the fact that the winner gets more resources for upgrading their Commander. Ick.

To me, these are mechanical choices that mis-understand the role of campaign play in table-top wargames. I want campaigns in my wargames for the same reason I play campaigns in ttRPGs: for the narrative elements. These decisions instead make campaigns a short-term affair with a winner and a loser. The mechanical systems presented here offer a benefit in that they expedite the ending of such a campaign so you get that winner or loser determined faster so you can start a new campaign.

Well I’ve dug my own grave on this one, haven’t I? Originally, I was planning to write up some Command & Conquer army lists for everybody, since Xenos Rampant sure does support it (and even mentions C&C in the introduction as one of its inspirations). But I can’t talk this kind of shit about campaign systems, which are, admittedly, one of the most difficult systems to write, and not show what I mean when I say I want something “better.”

Firstly, I want to make a quick definition of terms and compare the differences between what I call a “Competitive” vs a “Narrative” campaign system. Xenos Rampant has a competitive campaign system: there’s a winner and a loser, and you figure out which is which relatively fast. A narrative campaign system is not there to give you mechanical buffs for winning or debuffs for losing. Instead, it changes what you fight with or what you fight over. That doesn’t mean that a narrative system will have no mechanical aspects, but it means that it won’t inherently make the winner stronger and the loser weaker because that’s just going to spiral.

What kills me is that Xenos Rampant’s systems are already sooo good that it has the tool-set needed to make a truly great campaign system already included in the core book. When we come back next week, I’m going to pitch you a campaign system with guerrilla warfare, mercenaries, revolutionaries, super weapon programs, and a system of progression for your Commander that allows progression even when you’re losing.

Xenos Rampant is a relatively simple to learn large skirmish game that works with any miniatures you may have. If you’re like me and you’ve been buying some Wargames Atlantic stuff from their Death Fields line, you already have some great stuff to use. Xenos Rampant is a dramatically flexible rules set that gives you an incredible level of freedom in designing your own playable factions or forces, and comes with 12 scenarios to keep you from getting bored by death match style slog fests. The book has fantastic photos throughout, is extremely well written and easy to read, and nearly a quarter of the page count is custom settings to inspire you!

If your friend plays 40k but you’ve got a whole army for Konflikt '47, pick this up and fight each other. Or maybe your friend group has been dying to write your own setting and factions, playing out an entirely homebrew war game all your own. Xenos Rampant excels at providing that in the same way that a setting-agnostic ttRPG lets you GM anything you want. Even if you don’t plan to play Xenos Rampant, I’d recommend reading it just as an example of well-written and well-explained game mechanics. It’s certainly got solutions to systems I’ve not seen before. Their initiative system, which I should’ve mentioned under The Good, being a great example.