Mutant Test Drive
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| Humans on patrol. |
Mutants and Death Ray Guns is a tidy little ruleset designed for skirmishing in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. We chucked that setting and built two fairly evenly matched forces just to see how the bones of the system play out. The rules are essentially the same as those used in a sister game called A Song of Blades and Heroes, which utilize a hybrid IGOUGO and activation system.
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| Orcs on a mission. |
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| The battlefield. |
The orcs hit the park first, with the humans setting up nice wide flanking moves, but the game was decided in turn two when the human flamethrower got hit hard and died a gruesome death.
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| That orc in the foreground is about to murder the yellow-suited human on the next building over. You can see another human bleeding out to the right of the building, too. |
We figured that the flamethrower got hit by an errant bullet and went up in a huge ball of fire.
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| The orcs make a run using a building for cover. |
The game pretty much bogged down into a static firefight once the orcs got stuck in the park – which played to their advantage. We found the game moved fast once you figured out the modifiers, but man, we spent four turns just shooting and rolling without a lot of maneuver. That’s probably a fair representation of a real firefight, but it got to be a little tedious after a while. Could have been our dice rolling, too. Lot’s of low rolls and tie scores in this one.
Eventually, the humans made a rush for things, but they waited a little too long. After turn six the game was over, with the orcs fully in charge. Each side had lost two figures – one away from a forced morale check.
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| Power sword orc leader about to make minced human. |
The whole game took just over an hour – fifteen minutes longer than it says on the tin – but we may be able to speed that up with a little more experience. It also felt a little flat, but our forces were practically mirror images of each other. A few more special abilities and differing skills and such (like a horde army against a small elite force) should freshen things up a bit more, too.
I’ll go into a little more depth on the rules and what we did right and wrong later. For now, it’s good to be back even with a half-assed AAR like this one..jpg&container=blogger&gadget=a&rewriteMime=image%2F*)
Nice little report. I haven't tried this ruleset yet. I've tried SoBoH though its a nice little ruleset, I found ranged combat to be pretty tricky to pully off unless you have really high combat scores. Dice have a massive effect as well low rolls means pretty much no movement lol.
Does it differ much?
I haven't tried SoBoH yet, but so far agree that ranged combat is a bit sticky. That is to say, our game bogged down a bit with guys hunkered down trading ineffective shots for several turns. In this game, nobody had melee weapons to fall back on, so we didn't get stuck in much at all. I'd think that giving figures knives and bayonets would encourage more melee, but that wouldn't fit the sci-fi genre we were aiming at, so we didn't do it this time around.
I found that troops with low combat scores struggle to get hits on there opponents very often even with aiming.
What do you mean by low combat scores. We used guys with C2 jacked up to C4 by the use of guns, and they struggled to do anything much.
Of course, I agree with your sentiment. We had the best luck when combining fire, and I don't mean when ordered by a leader. Your best bet was to fire on a figure to put it on the ground, and then hit it a second time to turn that "Fallen" result into a "Removed from play" result.