Welcome back to Firefight Fridays. Last week, in the second article, we discussed the action menus on counters and the interaction between those options and the dice draft. We’ve now covered the core engine of the game, but are missing one very large piece of the puzzle. This week we will be talking about the battle grid (basically the map), terrain, and Fog of War.

When first designing Firefight Tactical there were several things I was looking to reimagine about the tactical genre, and the top of that list was the maps. Don’t get me wrong; I love my tactical maps. In fact, as I am writing this, I have a huge binder of my starter kit style ASL maps on my immediate left. At the same time, I have some big problems with the status quo of tactical game maps.

Firstly, they don’t handle FoW very well. Really in most games FoW begins and ends with the enemy’s position and does not extend to the battlefield itself. Instead, the officer in command (you) has such godlike reconnaissance of the field that you have the precise location of every single feature perfectly mapped out. My other perennial gripe with them is that there is such little dynamism represented in the battlefield. Obviously in reality the field itself does not change, but the soldier’s perspective of the field is constantly changing. Seemingly irrelevant terrain features can become tremendously significant simply due to the enemy repositioning.

Both issues are addressed by way of Firefight Tactical’s battle grid. Let’s begin by discussing the battle grid as part of scenario setup.

Calm Before the Storm

When setting up a scenario for Firefight Tactical you are shown a diagram of the battle grid. This provides you with the dimensions and a visual reminder of which cards will begin play faceup. For setup the battle grid specifies three types of terrain: Fog of War (FoW), Starting Terrain, and Fixed Terrain.

The battle grid is comprised of zones, and each zone is always described by a terrain card placed in that zone. Some zones may be at different elevations, but other than that the zone is entirely defined by its terrain card. For Starting Terrain and Fixed Terrain, you find the noted terrain card and place it into that zone face up. The remainder of the zones, the FoW zones, are dealt out randomly at the beginning of play.

A big part of setup is the construction of the terrain deck. Each scenario specifies all the terrain cards which comprise one, or sometimes two, terrain decks. These are put together and shuffled before play. These are the decks from which we deal out the random face down FoW cards at the end of the battle grid set up. The very last thing that happens here is Recon. In each scenario players will be given several cards that they may peek at, leaving them facedown, before placing out their units and performing their first turn. This means that both players will have some shared knowledge of the battlefield in the form of Starting and Fixed Terrain, but also some knowledge of the terrain that only they can plan around.

Cards as Terrain

The map of the battlefield is represented by cards for two very important reasons. Cards can be face down (Fog of War) and cards can be swapped out (dynamic mapping). These together are the essence of terrain in Firefight Tactical and I will address them individually. Before I do that though I want to talk about what terrain represents in Firefight Tactical. When you look in a zone and you see a house, that doesn’t mean that the house is the only thing in the large amount of ground represented by that zone. Instead, the house is what is tactically relevant in that zone. This is crucial to understand before we go into how Fog of War and map dynamism works.

Turn Your Fog Lights On

Fog of War is a very big part of Firefight Tactical. There is the FoW represented by concealment counters on units of course, but there is also the face down terrain cards. When a terrain card is facedown what it represents is that there is no terrain in that zone that is tactically relevant yet. It is an amalgamation of battlefield possibilities that will not become something concrete until a unit interacts with it in such a way that makes it become tactically relevant. The simplest way this happens is when a unit enters FoW. In that instance the card is flipped face up, and whatever terrain was in that zone is now tactically relevant because it is where the moving unit found itself. What’s also interesting though is how this works with concealed units. Concealed units do not flip face down terrain cards when they move into them. The player does, however, get to view them privately. This is because while the unit is in fact moving into the terrain (assuming it isn’t a decoy), it is not tactically relevant until they either reveal themselves or are revealed by the enemy. At that point the terrain is revealed.

The Quest for Decent Terrain

The other focus of the design of terrain in Firefight Tactical is battlefield dynamism. Even in play, the “map” is not fixed. This is because the cards of the map can be replaced due to game effects like lateral movement, scouting, and leader survey actions. Inthe case of a Scout action, whereas normally you enter FoW, flip the terrain card and end your movement, instead you get to flip the FoW card and draw a card from the terrain deck before choosing which terrain you happened upon. Mechanically you are viewing two cards and choosing which to play in the zone. Thematically both of those pieces of terrain could be found in ground you moved into, but by taking the time to do reconnaissance you were more likely to spot and move into superior terrain.

Even once you are in the terrain you can still move laterally. The unit simply moves within its zone and replaces the terrain it occupies with the top card of the terrain deck. Again, due to the abstraction of the battlefield their relative position to the other units in the field did not change. They simply moved about looking for better terrain in roughly the same part of the battlefield. This can be performed anywhere in the battle grid except for in Fixed Terrain.

Fixed Terrain usually represents scenario objectives. For example, if you are tasked with taking a bridge, the bridge will always be the most tactically relevant thing in its zone given that you are trying to capture it and your opponent is trying to defend it.

Let’s talk through a thematic example. You have a squad closing in on an enemy occupied farmhouse to close assault it. You need to find decent terrain to fire from to soften up the resistance before you attempt to take it. You use the squad to scout and upon reaching the Fog of War close to the house find that it was an open field. Since you scouted however, you draw another card from the terrain deck and replace the open field with a small orchard. It is not the best cover, but it is much better than an open field and now you have a decent position from which you can stage your assault. Now your forces know a better way to approach the enemy positions.

Send me a Postcard

Terrain cards in Firefight Tactical are straightforward. They have a name, a movement cost for infantry to enter them, a movement cost for vehicles to enter them, a terrain effect modifier that impacts fire and rally actions, and some types of terrain have a special effect. Some also have a risk of vehicles becoming bogged down but we will talk about that in another article. Their most key feature though is their impact on Line of Sight (LoS).

Each piece of terrain is either considered “open”, “hindering”, or “obstructing” terrain. Open terrain has no impact on line of sight whatsoever. Obstructing terrain completely blocks line of sight, so you can only trace it into or out of such terrain, never through. Hindering terrain partially obscures line of sight. This means that you can freely trace line of sight through it, but any attempt to fire through it will be impacted by the terrain effect modifier of each piece of hindering terrain between the firing unit and its target.

These six pieces of information create a great variety of terrain in Firefight Tactical. You will fight through thick woods, streams, houses, streets, bunkers, ruins, orchards, and more. Each terrain comes as its own unique piece of the tactical puzzle.

Don’t Lose Sight

There are no diagonals in Firefight Tactical. This extends to line of sight. The process for checking line of sight is so simple that once you understand it you will never have an in-game question about it. I personally cannot stand when games slow down the action to figure out whether a unit has line of sight. In Firefight Tactical you simply count how many rows and columns away the target is from the source. Trace line of sight first by going to the next row if they are more rows away than columns or vice versa. Then zig zag from there until you reach the target. If they are the same number of rows and columns away, the firing unit chooses which way to trace first. This simple system keeps the action brisk and makes sure you always have a definitive understanding of sight lines on the battlefield.

Chaos on the Battlefield

Having covered all this info about terrain and the battle grid I can now say that the best part of this system is the variety. I have said many times that I have played the first scenario of Firefight Tactical over 100 times and it has never played out the same way twice. A big part of that is due to the battle grid and Fog of War. The terrain deck for the first scenario is always populated by the same cards. The terrain is lightly wooded fields with some orchards and stone walls. Where those terrain features are dealt however is always different. Not only is the terrain always different, but even if a grove of trees is in the same zone in two different games, by the time myself and my enemy realize the trees are there, our forces are deployed very differently than in previous games.

This is the primary source of Firefight Tactical’s incredibly high level of replayability. All 12 scenarios can be played many times because the positioning of terrain and by extension the sight lines will always be different. Further, with the fact that the map is essentially a deck of cards it is incredibly easy to design custom scenarios (much more on that at another time).

That is about all I wanted to cover this time regarding terrain. Next week we will take a look at the different squad types in Firefight Tactical and what they each bring to the table (see what I did there?).

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Previous Articles:

Firefight Friday #1: Dice Driven Gaming

Firefight Friday #2: Ordering from the Menu