Welcome back to Firefight Fridays. Last week, in the tenth article, I talked about the fourth scenario, “About Last Night”. We looked at exciting new mechanics introduced by that scenario, like mortars and snipers. This week we will be moving on to one of my favorite scenarios, “Purple Heart Lane.” Purple Heart Lane is our Carentan scenario, and it adds a couple more new mechanics: multi-deck scenarios and off board artillery.
Welcome back to Firefight Fridays. Last week in the ninth article I talked about the third scenario, “Shot in the Dark”. I covered a couple of new concepts like reinforcements and night combat, neither of which are too different from what we have seen before. Well, buckle up, because this week we are jumping into “About Last Night”. Scenario 4 adds a few interesting new experiences to the game: multi-front scenario entry, snipers, and mortars. Multi-front scenario entry is pretty simple to understand, but let’s talk about snipers and mortars a little bit first and after we will jump into the details of “About Last Night.”
Welcome back to Firefight Fridays. Last week in the eighth article I talked about the second scenario, “Between the Reich and a Hard Place”. To do that, we had to cover the basics of support weapons. Now as we move on this week we will look at the third scenario, “A Shot in the Dark”. This scenario is a demonstration of two new concepts in the game: night combat, and reinforcements.
Welcome back to Firefight Fridays. Last week, in the seventh article, I talked about my approach to scenario design, then about the history, design, and surface level strategies for the first scenario, “Done with Sand”. This week I will be doing the same thing, covering the second scenario “Between the Reich and a Hard Place”.
Welcome back to Firefight Fridays. Last week, in the sixth article, I wrote up an AAR based on our recorded playthrough of scenario 7, “To the Last Man, To the Last Cartridge”. This week we are shifting gears into the first in a multi-part series on the scenario design of Firefight Tactical. For this first article, since we will be covering the smaller first scenario, “Done with Sand”, I want to take a little bit of time to cover my scenario design philosophy for Firefight Tactical in general.
Welcome back to Firefight Fridays. Last week in the fifth article we covered the major checks that occur in a game of Firefight Tactical. In doing so we finally finished talking about the core game mechanics, and in celebration we will do something entirely different this week. Firefight Tactical’s lead developer, Peter Evans, and I recorded a playthrough of the game’s Cherbourg scenario, “To the Last Man, To the Last Cartridge.” Peter played as the Americans, while I played as the German defenders. You can watch the video HERE. For this week’s article I will be writing up an AAR from that session for your enjoyment (hopefully). Please note as I am describing direction in the write up that my perspective is from the north looking south. Let’s get started.
Welcome back to Firefight Fridays. Last week in the fourth article we looked at the core squad types and their functions. This week we will round out the core mechanisms and look at how checks work. This will be superficially familiar to many, but I promise there are some fun wrinkles in there.
Many actions in Firefight Tactical will come down to a dice roll. While some of these specific actions have their own small deviations, they primarily relate to five basic checks. These are Fire Checks, Morale Checks, Rally Checks, Bog Checks, and Melee Checks.
Welcome back to Firefight Fridays. Last week in the third article we discussed the battle grid and terrain in Firefight Tactical. At this point we have looked at most of the essentials of how the game works, so let’s start talking about the fun stuff that is built on top of the game’s engine. Specifically, this week we are talking about the five core squad types of Firefight Tactical, how they differ, and how they should optimally be used.
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.
Welcome back to Firefight Fridays. Last week in the first article we discussed the dice draft and how Firefight Tactical is constructed around it. We covered what is being modeled by the dice draft and how it can be used to get an edge on your opponent. This week we will be looking at the other half of the dice draft handshake, the action menu.
