A Fast and Dirty Fight

...
Just before all this happened, myself and James had a try of a set of 'Hard Sci-Fi' rules, to get  play out of his shiny new collection of suitable 15mm troops.

The rules were apparently called 'Fast and Dirty' and if so are available, free, here:  F&D Rules but I was entirely at the tutelage of James on such matters and only had a copy of the playsheet to go by.  From what I can recall it was an Activation based system, with variable unit and weapon mechanics; but generally based on a small unit scale - 1 to 1 essentially.

I set up a - ultimately rather too open - battlefield, with a few copses of woodland on a rolling plain, crossed by a rail line and a road.  James provided a selection of papercraft buildings to go with the infantry.  As defender I had around a platoon of troops, roughly 30 men, to defend the settlement and this key crossroad, I could not know from which direction attack may come, and so spread my sections around, with a heavy machine gun in the centre and my command group based in the main building group.

Deployments 

Central force and HQ, at the Bar of course! 

Naturally the first advance of the enemy came in my rear echelon, where I had the weakest provision. 

Opening attack 

Fire from my opponents wounded a couple of soldiers, and forced the rest in to cover behind the lone building.

Then the attack intensified 

A heavy machine gun was also turned on them, and a second squad appeared in the same area, it would turn out to be the enemy HQ element.  Heavy suppresive fire was put into my rear elements, but the open terrain meant that what of my troops could respond found their targets easy to identify.

The enemy attack breaks up 

Elsewhere a withering exchange between my machine gun covering the railway, and a section of enemy in the wooded hill opposite continued; but the bloodiest exchanged proved to be when the enemy proved unwilling to enter woodland near the rail line, and instead tried to skirt around it.  My own section deployed in that position re-positioned and was able to exert a savage ambush.

It was slaughter 

By this point the attack had faltered, and although there were a few losses on my side, those of the enemy proved more severe, and the chaos in their command structure meant it was no longer possible for them to make headway.

The enemy begins to withdraw

The result was mine, but this was more a case of testing the rules.  From what I can recall nearly two months down the line (I know, I'm rubbish at doing write-ups in a timely fashion) the core of the rules was quite reasonable, with a decent activation and morale system, but we made some design mistakes.  Not nearly enough terrain for a game were ranges were essentially infinite, not enough firepower in the hands of the heavy weapons either (essentially they acted more like sniper rifles than machine guns).  

For me, a bit like Bolt Action, the suppression system rather wound down the usefulness of units irretrievably, and reduced them to simple pinging back at whoever last fired on them; there proved to be an ability to recover and revise the plan in battle.

I don't think James has, as a result, settled on a ruleset, so we may never see these again.  But he his a nice little collection of models and hopefully we'll see more of them in future.

...