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I bought this on a whim due to the low price and quality looking front cover, and I was not disappointed! I rarely write reviews but this deserves praise.
The quality production continues throughout, something you would expect to cost 3 times the price if from a bigger publisher.
The rules are very clever and polished. They look like they will be very fast to play, but far from bland and simplistic. They definitely give the right feel. It appears the author is going to add various modules with advanced rules, so you can give this a go and decide if you like it and want more! To be clear though, this is a complete and playable set without any extras.
The game makes use of a pack of playing cards for everything, which is semi novel in its approach (I say semi as this is not the first game to do it but it may well be new to a lot of players; there are lots of games that use cards in their activation process, such as products from Too Fat Lardies, and Never Mind the Billhooks, but I am aware of very few games that are entirely cardbased. Perhaps the most well known being One Hour Skirmish Wargames by John Lambshead).
Models have a stat line that includes their movement, 'shooting' and defensive ('resilience') abilities, their 'fitness' for strength-based tasks, and their 'proficiency' for skill-based tasks, with better quality troops having higher stats. To succeed in a task, the player must draw a card less than or equal to the relevant stat, plus or minus situational modifiers. Some tasks are opposed and the defender must not only draw lower or equal to their relevant stat, but also higher than the attacker's card.
Initiative is a simple draw of the card with the higher winning. Initiative will therefore move back and forth between players in this way. what is clever though is how the game forces you to think about keeping your models together in appropriate fire teams as you then use your card to determine how many models can activate under your round of initiative by hovering the card over the table and seeing how many miniatures it covers. if all your models are very spread out then you will likely only be able to activate one at a time before another initiative check. Models activated under the same initiative may all carry out different actions; this is very much a small scale skirmish game where every model is its own unit, but given the fast-play feel I think you could easily manage a platoon-sized game if you keep your models grouped appropriately for the aforementioned initiative card.
Shooting is opposed, using the attacker's shooting stat and the defender's resilience. If the shooting is successful then a further card draw will identify if the defender is supressed, injured, or knocked out. Injured models need to be stabilised. The inclusion of an injured state is nice for small games but you may want to just count this as a knocked out result if you are a small elite team fighting a high number of militia.
There are rules covering body armour, level of equipment bulk, overwatch, carrying out tasks and more, and the first module released: 'The Stack Combat Pack', includes lots of rules for various weapon types and blasts, as well as all sorts of orders, including the use of numerous support assets.
If you aren't one of these diehards who cannot see past the D6 then give them a go. And if you are, then you should still give them a go as you may be pleasantly surprised. Perhaps a discussion on dice versus cards is for another time but it is cool how many great mechanics can be seamlessly woven into the game because of the use of cards for everything.
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