Osprey Games latest is a starfighter game. This should be right up my alley as I love a good dogfighting game of air or space combat. I have some experience with playing and designing this type of game so I am really looking forward to this one.
My pedigree in flying games goes way back to Aeronautica Imperialis (V1) from Forgeworld and Warwick Kinrade. I was a bit late to the party but have many fun games since. I spent a lot of time hand-making planes, making modifications to the rules, new aircraft, and new missions. On the old Airspace Forums I even ran several annual narrative campaigns. Since then, I tried several other aircraft and starfighter games with varying degrees of success/interest. I still have those PDFs somewhere, I should make them available somewhere. Maybe for Patreon Patrons?
As an added bonus the writer of Voidfighter, Casey Garske; is a fellow Minnesotan. For those who do not know, Minnesota is a frozen wasteland just south of Canada in the top middle of the United States. If you have seen the movie or TV show Fargo it is that area. The motel scene at the very end of the film was filmed right outside the town I grew up in. White Bear Lake, "Go Bears" was just south of my hometown. I wonder if he and I have ever crossed paths over a gaming table or in a FLGS? If so, it would have been some time ago as I no longer live in the area.
Final note, this game is 80 pages long. Since Castles in the Sky I think Osprey has increased the length of their Blue Books from 62 to 80 pages. I think this is a good idea as it allows the games to breath a bit more and add in some of the stuff that allows a designer to go beyond the 4Ms. I like to think my work helped pave the way for this change.
Anyway, enough waffling about. It is time to kick the tires and light the fires!
Things I Liked
I always love a model and scale agnostic game, and this fits the bill. I was also happy to see the game uses facings for various rules which helps add to the tactical game play. Even though there is no real basing or scale, the rules do have three sizes of ships from Snub Fighters, to Gunships, to Corvettes. There is no real need to base or even use minis, as flats would work just fine too. If you have old X-wing, Aeronautica Imperialis, Battlestar Galactica, Micro Machine toys, or Armored Clash aircraft you should be just fine to play. The typical game is between 4 to 16 per side.
This game uses stander RPG polyhedrons with dice shifting. I.e. instead of adding or subtracting modifiers, you move from one type of dice to roll to the higher or lower dice rolling. In addition, all dice rolls are 2dX. You roll two dice and add them together. This makes a nice curve of results that savvy players can use to their advantage and allows a bit of predictability in dice results that single dice do not have.
The heart of the game is opposed rolls, but there are unopposed rolls for certain actions and pilot checks. Opposed rolls are a nice feature as it keeps both players in the game and rolling simultaneously for speed of resolution. In a dogfight game you want to keep things moving quickly to keep the speed of the game up to match the action. Unusually, in the Unopposed rolls your opponent also rolls to represent the "Uncaring Universe". This allows players to avoid looking up target numbers for speed of game play, but means that the Player has more randomness in their calculation.
I am very happy to see so many modern games using command points to perform special actions. This game is no exception. You get a set amount per round, with limitations if you lose your flight leader. These allow you to perform special actions like the famous Cobra Maneuver, fire torpedoes, Re-group, etc. It can also be used to modify rolls. It you have seen it in a movie you will find it here.
There are a decent amount of movement and gunnery actions that you can take, even before you go into using command points. Unlike most Osprey books, the extra size allows a roster and Quick Reference sheet in the back. However, it doesn't really cover these maneuvers. Ships can do a Manuever or Medium move once per speed of the Voidfighter, so a Voidfighter with a speed of 3 can do any combination of Moves or Maneuvers up to 3.
Things I Did Not Like
Measuring sticks. Not a huge fan of these, but I know several game systems that make use of them. To me they are just another barrier to entry, similar to templates. They should be 2.5 inches, 5 inches, and 10 inches respectively. Seeing these stick reminded me a bit the rules for Of Gods and Mortals also from the Osprey Wargaming Series. These sizes are referred to as Short, Medium, and Long in the rules.
In addition to dice shifting, there are the occasional actual modifiers. I am not a fan of this as it goes against the Universal Mechanics established earlier for the game. However, it does add a bit of granularity where it maybe needed that dice shifting does not allow.
Interestingly, in a sci-fi game there is NO pre-measuring allowed. This promotes mistakes in gameplay and also keeps the speed up as players have to commit to an action instead of hee-hawing around. However, I am not 100% sure it fits a far future sci-fi setting where such technology would be easy to acquire.
It looks like Initiative for this game is all or nothing. The winner moves second and shoots first. Activation is in groups, with a quarter moving at a time and then the opponent moving. This is not an intuitive approach as there is a chart to help you figure our how many ships to activate. I think it would have been better to use a Frostgrave style approach where the Flight Leader activates with 3 others, then the XO Activates with up to three others, and then everyone else. That is if you wanted alternate group activation. The easiest solution may have simply been a wingman/Squadron system where they have alternate activations for movement.
There is a hit location table for each fighter, and I am not sure I like this level of detail for snubfighters. I think I prefer a 1 or 2 hit removal rather than the attritional type of fighting we see here. The level of detail maybe too much for the scale of the game?
Loved the artwork in the book, but I was less thrilled with the miniature images. It was not that the miniatures looked bad, but it was hard to see them on the space backdrops. A hazard of space games. In addition, the miniature photos had to be made smaller to fit all the text for the game into 80 pages.
Meh and Other Uncertainties
Of note, this is designed to be a "kitchen table" game. Therefore, it can play on a 3 x4 or even slightly smaller space. These have become popular as the hobby of wargaming has grown. Space and time seem to be in limited supply, so it makes sense that players would gravitate into games that can fit in smaller spaces and quicker matches. There is nothing that would keep this game from being playable on a larger space either.
There is a nice selection of space terrain for the game from asteroids, to turrets, to gravity anomalies, to space creatures. Enough to keep any board interesting.
There is also some pre-made factions and ships for the built-in setting of the game. However, this game also has about 4 and a half pages on designing your own ships. I am torn because there is no system of designing that someone can not break, but players love to have this feature to make their own corner of the universe or fit some existing sci-fi franchise. Here you can have it both ways.
There are rules for recruiting your squadrons and giving them Traits as well. Again, this allows players to customize their experience with the game. However, there are a lot of moving parts in this game with maneuvers, traits, command points, etc. This may lead to some cognitive load, so it might be best to decide what you are going to use or not use with your opponent before play.
There are 12 scenarios and rules for campaigns. This helps with the replayability of the game.
Final Thoughts
For those real old timers, this made me want to track down and get some Wing Commander themed 3D prints. If you know where a guy can get some, please, please, please leave a comment. I would be very happy!
If you have a ton of starship/future/alternate history aircraft sitting around, this would be a nice little pick-up. Since it is miniature agnostic you could even make die cast or film licensed themed toys work if you really wanted to.
This is a solid set of core rules with all the things you need for a good old fashioned space dogfighting game. There are also enough bells and whistles to keep it engaging. I am probably in the minority when I say I would love a 3D layer added to the rules to add to the tactical play. Most games of this type do not get that ambitious and this is no exception. Adding a 3rd dimension can make game play much more cumbersome, increase the cognitive load, and just add something else to track. However, it adds such a great layer of tactical play to the game. The game all ready probably has too many options and maneuvers as is, so a 3D element would be too much.
This would make a fine club night game or even a campaign game. I could see really inventive players tying this in with large land and space campaigns as well. You can see the core inspirations on the tin, and that is just fine! Innovation is over-rated. This game gets the right mix of new mechanics in with solid and familiar aircraft flying game rules. Most of my complaints are simply quibbles and preferences.
Hopefully I will have this out on the table soon. Until next time!
Or purchase all out games at the Blood and Spectacles Publishing Wargames Vault Page!
Thanks for the review, definitely be picking up a copy now. Had it on my radar for a while as I've got loads of Silent Death minis sitting around. Probably change the initiative though as it sounds a tad too intricate. Actually like measuring sticks though: used them with Space Weirdos (also by Casey Garske) and, yes they're a bit of a initial investment but they do speed up play IMHO.
ReplyDeleteBTW if you've got somebody that can do 3D printing there's number of Wing Commander minis on Thingiverse, just do a search for 'wing commander'.