Playtest Report - Gut Check! 15mm Solo Rules

For some time now, I've been following the development of the Gut Check! 15mm Solo Rules.  Spacejacker from Tiny Solitary Soldiers (one of the best 15mm painting blogs around, by the way) came up with these rules as a way to fight 15mm skirmishes using Heroscape hex tiles as terrain.

I adapted the rules to one of my standard 2' x 2' desert boards (1 hex simply became 2"), came up with stats for an Alliance Ground Forces fire team (Rebel Minis Earthforce) as the player force, and Gorker desert scum (out of production MJ Space Orks) as the enemy.  I printed off my force rosters, grabbed a deck of cards and some counters, loaded the rules on my Android tablet, and sat down for a trial game.



The fire team used 24 build points.  The sergeant received an additional point to Guts, Grit, Shoot, Armor, and was equipped with an assault rifle.  Three members of the fireteam were equipped with light armor and assault rifles, the last with light armor and a SAW.

From Basement Gaming Bunker

This gave me six "blips" to use for my enemy force.  The first turn went pretty quickly.  On the Alliance side, only the Sergeant and SAW gunner passed their Guts test to activate... both took "evade" actions along the ridgeline. Four of the Gorker blips stayed still, and two moved into line of sight.  The first blip was revealed as a three-Gorker fireteam including one heavy weapon.

From Basement Gaming Bunker

The second was a "6" on the blip chart - a leader and D6 (4 in this case) additional Gorkers (including another heavy weapon).  A few more turns of the deck gave the Gorker boss a chance to open fire.  He did, inflicting a Shock counter on the Alliance SAW gunner.  The SAW gunner shot back and scored a Messy Kill on the Gorker boss.  I then removed all counters and rolled for the second turn.

From Basement Gaming Bunker

The Gorkers claimed initiative.  Now that I had both blips and enemy models on the table, I used the card deck to determine all enemy movement.  For "out of LOS" cards, I activated blips.  For "in LOS," I used the Gorkers already on the table.  I can only assume I was playing this correctly... these are still a draft ruleset after all!  This second turn saw a major exchange in fire, but the end results killed one Gorker (one of the heavy weapon gunners at that), and Shocked two more.  Two more blips moved very close to LOS, but never did get revealed.

The first two turns took me about an hour to play, but it does look like it will speed up as I get more familiar with the rules.  Spacejacker has promised a set of enemy activation counters to replace the playing cards - that should speed things up even more.  In any case, this was a good demo game for me.  I'm going to spend an evening digesting them, and hopefully I'll have time to post a detailed review tomorrow.  But if you're looking for a good skirmish set for solo play - check these out!

Chris