All dressed up and nowhere to go! I waffled quite a bit on my "more sci-fi gaming in 15mm" vows last year, so I'm trying to rectify that this year. To start off with are the very-in-development rules called Gut Check!, emphasis on the exclamation!
I started following Spacejacker's blog, Tiny Solitary Soldiers because of his excellently painted 15mm troopers (still waiting on that basing tutorial). Then he started adding in some re-purposed Heroscape terrain as terrain, again excellently done.
Putting it all together Gut Check! was born, his home-brewed solo skirmish rules specifically for 15mm sci-fi. Which of course sounded right down my alley. I opened with, "all dressed up and nowhere to go" because as you can see from the top pic, I was SO close to trying out the rules! We've got a large RPG session inbound tonight so I had to clean off the table, all of it. Gut Check! was shelved...for now, but I snapped some pics anyway.
Gut Check! is a hex-based game, and you can easily use a dry-erase hex map or even oversized hex paper copied off at an office copy store. For me, I went with Heroscape tiles, very recently reclaimed I might add. These work great because, obviously, they're three dimensional (and come already painted if you don't have the time for a repaint). The above battlefield is about twice as big as recommended for an intro game, but I was wanting to put all of my tiles out there and see just how much I had and what I could do exactly. I was pleasantly surprised to be able to make it roughly square to boot.
ConFed Troopers (GZG Japanese Corporate) were to one of my squads. There's no points cost in Gut Check!, just statting your models with a 'common sense' method. Same thing goes for the weapons, of whihc a short sample list is already given.
My Mangalore Mercs, also from GZG, are fewer in number, but tout better toughness and deadlier guns (though shorter in range). I've got some more of these unpainted I should whip up, these are great looking figs.
Fresh off the factory floor, post sealant spray, is one of the sat-comm towers. This made for a very nice piece of 'flavor text' terrain on the hex map. Although there aren't any hexes on the base of it, it should be easy enough to approximate. It could make for an actual objective, or just some sci-fi goodness hanging out in the background.
So there you have it, Gut Check! of sorts, if nothing else think of this as a preview of things to come. Check out his site, download the rules, and I'm sure if you had any feedback, that'd be appreciated as well! But the 15mm gaming isn't done!
Another ruleset that I've got my eye on is Gruntz, which also seems made just for what I'm looking for. Here's the Gruntz blurb:
Grunts is a dedicated 15mm fast play wargame designed for skirmish level play with between 10 to 40 figures per side using combined arms. You can use miniatures from any 15mm SCI-FI manufacturer. It is based around a generic platoon level battle, not restricted to a set genre or background setting. Vehicle and artillery rules are included for a combined arms gaming experience with statistics provided for all manufacturers of 15mm sci-fi and modern figures.Gruntz and Gut Check! aside I've also purchased the highly recommended Future War Commander rulebook, so my 15mm sci-fi gaming options are wide open, and I'm open to any other suggestions you may have!
