I'm a hobbyist game designer. I love looking at games for ideas on how to improve or change them for fun, and I enjoy making up new games. I've arbitrarily decided that during 2024, I'm going to publish one new game each month. Some will be mods of existing games, others will be new games I've developed.
This month's game is something of a cheat, because I actually developed it at the end of last year. (To make up for the cheat, I've got a bunch of hacks for my Skuffle Wammer 5-minute wargame, which I'll publish to this blog over the next few weeks, but won't count toward my one-game-a-month goal.) I'd intended to release it in January of 2024, but Itch.io had a big sale at the start of December, so I accelerated the publication date to take advantage of that.
This month's game is called Raid!. It's a one-against-many miniature wargame. Here are my design notes for it.
Raid isn't meant to be a quick game, but it is meant to be small. You can clear a spot on your desk (the size of an A4 or Letter size paper is enough) and then have a game that kind of goes on all day. You can play a round, and then work for an hour, then play another round, and then work, and so on.
Raid is modelled after action movies, like Death Wish and RoboCop and Dredd, in which a singular hero bursts into a hive of scum and villainy, and takes down everyone in the place. The hero is essentially invincible in those movies, and so the hero in Raid cannot be killed. At worst, the hero can be injured, but injury (represented as bonus Injury Dice) actually makes the hero stronger. The problem is, there's a seemingly endless supply of enemy reinforcements. So while the hero never dies, the real challenge is to definitively clear the board.
This is an intermediate wargame, meaning that its rules expect you to know common wargame concepts. You must have one miniature to represent the Hero, and at least 12 miniatures representing Gangers.
The game is asymmetric, so the rules for the Hero and Gangers are different. Instead of player turns, there are two phases.
During the Hero phase, the Hero moves and attacks.
One a small game board, there's no restriction on how far you can move. If you're playing on a larger board, like 60 cm or 1 meter square, you can impose reasonable limits on movement.
The Hero can attack one Gang. A Gang consists of three or more miniatures that move around the board together. To attack, the Hero rolls 1d6 for each Ganger being targeted. For a ranged attack, 4+ is considered High. For a ranged attack, 3+ is considered High.
After rolling your attack, discard the Lows and pass the Highs over to the Ganger player (which may be yourself, in a solo game). The Ganger player rolls the High dice, and removes one targeted Ganger for any result other than a 6.
The Ganger phase is similar to the Hero phase, except that the street Gangs have a few extra options (you are rading their home turf, after all).
As the Ganger player, you can move and attack with one Gang.
When a Gang makes a Ranged attack, you roll 1d6 for each Ganger making an attack. For a ranged attack, 4+ is considered High. After rolling your attack, discard the Lows and pass the Highs over to the Hero player (which may be yourself, in a solo game). The Hero player rolls the High dice, and gains 1 Injury Dice for anything other than a 6.
For a melee attack, you don't roll dice at all. You hit automatically. Yes, Gangers hit automatically in melee, and for each Ganger making a melee attack, you gain 1 Ganger Reinforcement. Place fresh Ganger miniatures on the farthest edge of the game board as a new Gang. The Hero player gains 1 Injury for each Reinforcement you've added.
The Hero player must spend Injury Dice on attacks. With Injury Dice, you make your attack as usual, except you add your Injury Dice to your dice pool. That means you might be attacking a Gang of 3 Gangers, but you're rolling 4 or 5 or 6 (or more!) dice. If your attack includes Injury Dice, though, you discard the Highs and hand the Lows to the Ganger player.
My games of Raid! last a long time because that's sort of what it's designed for: one game a day, played intermittently when I need a break from work. I've played it as an actual sit-down-and-game game with other people, though, and for that I implement a Reinforcement Limit. If the Ganger player gets 9 Reinforcements on the board, then the game is over and the Gangs win. If the Gangs are wiped out before that happens, then the Hero wins.
After I've finished painting a group of miniatures, I usually put them on my desk so I can gaze lovingly at them over the course of the next week. As a result, I've tested Raid! with lots of different miniatures. I've played Space Marines against Space Marines, every member of the Fellowship against a bunch of Goblins, Fallout survivor against traitor guardsmen, civilian against zombies, and so on more. It's a lot of fun to "test drive" your miniatures with this, partly because the imbalance of melee and ranged attacks really forces you to change your strategy, and it often inspires homebrew rule adjustments. Legolas, for instance, feels better at range, and feels like he ought to have an extra attack. By contrast, a chainsaw-wielding diner waitress has no ranged attack, so she's got to go in for melee, but melee is death for the Hero player, so what do you do to account for that?
The lack of a death mechanic for the Hero can definitely lead to long games. A countdown timer to limit Reinforcements helps, but then again there's not much a Hero can do to account for the time pressure. You basically just have to hope for kind dice. Maybe a mod to allow the hero to choose between Movement and an extra Attack would at least provide plausible deniability that you could have won if you'd only Attacked instead of Moved that one time...
The mixed-blessing of Injury Dice has some surprising effects. Asymmetry is, admittedly, a lot harder to keep straight than you realise. I got into the habit of reciting this mantra to prepare for the game:
Always discard the Lows. Unless you're injured! Then discard the Highs.
It's a fun little game, though, and the effects of asymmetrical rules are fascinating to observe. Whether you want a 6 for your defence roll depends on what other factors are affecting your roll. You can download the full rules, and the cheatsheet to help you keep the sequence straight, from Itch.io.
Header photo by Seth Kenlon, licensed Creative Commons cc0.