FUBAR Ruminations

Woah, four posts in four days, this blog just might be back.  It's amazing how much more time a guy has when he's not coaching his daughter's soccer team to a league championship.  That's right, I know how to coach soccer - the secret is inheriting kids from other coaches who know what the heck they are doing.

Same scenario. Different rules.  Different results.

This weekend, our first game of FUBAR pit two evenly matched forces in a fight for the mining station.  The humans consisted of roughly 25 Veteran troops backed up by three 2-man HMGs and a sniper team.  The lizardfolk had 20 infantry and 5 cavalry at their disposal.  For the purposes of learning the game, we classified the cavalry as vehicles armed only with a single HMG.  In both cases, we used units of roughly 5 men/lizards with the snipers operating alone, and the cavalry split into two units of 2 and 3 lizards.  Aaaaand, fight!

We spent a fair few minutes hashing out what the rules mean by ‘unit’.  In retrospect, it doesn’t really matter from a balance perspective.  Large units means more guys sitting around when they fail to activate. Small units mean that you always have at least a few guys doing something, even if they aren’t as effective as the big groups when they do act.

To big for infantry, too small for vehicles.  Time for Rule One!

We treated the cavalry as vehicles, but it felt wrong.  They were too tough to bring down, and the idea that they have more armor in front is a bit silly.  In retrospect, I’d treat them as vehicles except that every hit should be classified as against the rear armor (roll twice and take the higher result).  That makes them more fragile than tanks, but keeps them fast and dangerous.

We also had a talk about what the lizard-mounted guys were armed with on a personal basis.  He sweet talked me into allowing them to have assault rifles, when I figured the little blue shlubs would be hard pressed to work a big cannon with one strapped to their back.  Not a big deal, but something that should be worked out on both sides before the game starts.

Space-bug-angel-demons!

With this experience under our belts, we're amped up to try the bug rules from the "Generic Sci-Fi" one page supplement.  It looks like they'll handle very different from standard troops.  That's another thing that felt off with our test run - the lizards didn't feel alien enough - but that's a function of using the rules in as vanilla a fashion as possible to get a handle of things.

Next time will be different.

These Rules Are FUBAR

Last night, the boy and I headed down to the weekly game night and threw together a quick test drive of the FUBAR rules.

For those of you who don’t know, FUBAR is a free, one-page, sci-fi set of rules from Gawd ‘Elp Us Games. As a one page set of rules they are reasonably complete, with all the standard rules for initiative, activation, movement, firing, melee, and morale. It uses a bit of a hybrid game turn with elements of IGO-UGO and action-reaction. Whoever wins initiative activates units by beating a target number based on troop quality – better troops are more likely to activate. When a unit fails its activation, that unit goes onto overwatch, and play passes to the opposite player.

Like this, only bigger.

Firepower is resolved in the standard manner – roll dice for each little man (with extra dice added for squad support weapons), and each die that beats a target number (modified by things like aiming, troop quality, and cover), hits a figure.  Any hit figure that doesn’t make an armor save is hurt.  Sort of.  The first few wounds suppress a figure and left over ouchies eliminate a figure.

The deal here is that each suppressed figure in a unit makes it harder to activate on their next turn.  If your unit fails to activate, your suppressed figures stand back up, but that unit is stuck on overwatch for the turn.  As a result, choosing between suppression and casualties gives you the choice protecting your men and making it more likely that your unit does what you want them to do.

As a one-page rule set, there were a number of issues that cropped up during play for which we had no real answers.  All we could do was use common sense and roll a die.  Although, to be honest, I wound up giving the boy the benefit of the doubt more often than not cause I’m just that kind of Dad.

Let’s leave more detailed discussion of the rules for another day.  The take home message here is that the rules are light, quick, and easy, and we’re looking forward to more games.  Now that we’ve resolved the bulk of the drudgery of the rules, we’re eager to put them to use with more sophisticated scenarios and asymmetric forces.

Next time, I’ll bore you with the stuff that won’t make a lot of sense if you’re not familiar with the rules.  Promise.