Description

Blasted Planets Skirmish, is basically a set of house rules a few friends and I use to play games with my Sci-Fi figures. I am not trying to model a "Hard" Sci-Fi environment here. I'm borrowing as much from Horror and Fantasy as I am from Sci-Fi. I mean how serious can you be. When you have, Dog headed, Gator men chasing an Elephant guy around an Omni Field generating White rabbit? There is enough "real" world framework here that basic tactics work (most of the time). But enough of a fantastical element that you really can't count on the idea that the Fin headed alien with the pin gun is going to nail the cave man with the rock every time.

One thing for sure is I am not even trying to come up with a back story for this nonsense. That of course does not mean that you can't. Half or maybe even more than half of the fun of this game is cooking up an army before the game that that functions in some strange way that will confuse or irritate your opponent. If we had a back-story or universal framework that would on some levels really blow that idea out of the water.

On another note the rule formatting is kind of weird. I'm not pretending that it is clever, it's just a reflection of the way my mind works and how I make sense out of things. But I think that it is comprehensible to most "Wargamers" the phrasing in some cases is really tortured. You can thank the fact, that several of my buddies are Super competitors, for this. When you run in to a sentence or paragraph that feels like you are creeping through a minefield there is a real good chance some egregious abuse on the table of an earlier phrasing, required some careful phraseology. The guys you play with may not need this sort of structure. But most of the guys I play with are (at least when rules interpretation is concerned) fundamentally evil in nature. I'm not talking about your basic hearty laugh at a handicapped person trying to struggle to their feet in the grocery aisle after a fall from the wheel chair. I'm talking about the type of stuff that ensures most of these guys will probably spend a good part of eternity as consultants at the right hand of Satan himself. By reading the rules especially some, special abilities and the way they can be combined, and looking at my figures you can probably and rightly conclude that I have my own share of disturbing thoughts. But half of the time these guys leave me feeling like I'm Bo Peep in John Wayne Gacey's crawl space. I'm mentioning all this not as an excuse, but as an explanation as to why the rules are written the way that they are. I mean, I have to be able, when these guys try something particularly twisted, to say, "that?s clearly not, what the intention of that rule is." Of course the easy way out is just always pointing out, that these rules are a perpetually open Beta project.

So that is why we have the Blasted Planets Forum. I am going to do my best to check in at least every couple of days and try to respond to any questions or ideas you all may have. We have played enough games over the years that I know that with the right approach it is possible to play a game with these rules with out any mid game re writes. That is not to say that there are no re-write artifacts in the rules and that the punctuation all works right. If you run in to a problem and come up with a solution for it, please go ahead and post it to the forum. An important thing to remember though is that with all the possible Special ability combinations it is quite possible to come up with an army that just won't work against the enemy you are facing. No matter how hard you try and no matter how well you roll the dice. If you use 600pt armies on a 4x4 or 4x5 table you can probably knock out a couple of games in an after noon. One thing I have always enjoyed is playing two games with the same armies and table set up but giving each player a chance to play each side. This is especially gratifying if one player has gone in to full on Gloat mode after defeating a thoroughly outclassed opposing army.

One last thing is a note on terrain; the rules as written cover use of flat top contours for elevation. I know that not every one uses this type of terrain. So Line of site line of fire rules are probably the thing that will most often have to be adapted to whatever you happen to use. I have written no rules for the use of buildings so knock yourself out in that area. I have some nice buildings but have not figured out as way to use them that I like in this type of games. All the other games I play use built up areas rather than individual buildings and I do not think that that fits well with Blasted Planets Skirmish.

—description from the designer