Description

The Sound of Metal is a fully cooperative (or solo) tabletop miniatures skirmish game. With a rogue-lite campaign system, players take on the roles of survivors of humans, trying to get by after the downfall of civilization, a result of the Great Robot Uprising.

After a large meteor crashes into the planet, the Robot overlords start to experience communication issues and many start to malfunction. Humans dubbed this event as "The Glitch" and see it as their opportunity to take back their planet. This is no easy task, as the human population is just a fraction of what it once was, and communication is a challenge. Although the Robots have been greatly disrupted, they are still, in every sense of the word, a great threat.

Players create survivors, find a vehicle, and traverse the countryside, gathering resources, finding food and weapons, and learning skills to complete mission objectives. In doing so, players characters will level up, gain notoriety, and try to find and destroy the machines central core.

The game features an action-point based system - These points double as action points and your characters health. As your character takes wounds, they lose action points. Run out of action points, and you collapse.

Combat/skill checks are performed by rolling dice, bolstered by stats and gained skills.

Similar to the great tactical, turn-based video games of the 90s, such as X-Com and Jagged Alliance, players can spend extra action points to perform actions at higher levels of competency, being able to aim, change their stances, or focus on specific tasks.

Enemies are controlled by the game's AI - each enemy has its own order of operations reactionary programming. Players face these enemies in campaign missions, as well as random encounters.

The world unfolds in front of the players - as they track their progress on the overworld map. Moving costs food and fuel, and dangers lurk around every corner. The map is be randomly generated each game, and players will find settlements, points of interest and missions in different areas every game.

Players never control more than 6 survivors at a time, and can be played with 1-6 players cooperatively, splitting up the survivors among players.

—description from the designer