Alternative Armies - Firefight - Charity Shop find ruleset

 

Sometimes when leaving a charity shop it's with a sense of having been beguiled, I know that there was something great in the place and I just couldn't find it. On other occasions, such as this one, I spot something straight away. It's an old ruleset from "Alternative Armies" that predates the internet, and as such might as well be filed alongside court tennis or bear-baiting as far as online presence is concerned.

It was also intact, intriguing and dirt cheap.

I was old enough to have bought the game when new - however I was really only interested in Warhammer back then. So it's new to me as a ruleset.

The game is designed to be played from the ruleset and inserts, merely by cutting out the gridded terrains and character cards, etc. I just can't bring myself to do that with a rulebook that's survived 30 yrs or so. So I improvise.

I'm using the various room tiles from Mantic's "Star Saga" and some of their Deadzone figures which I had at hand. I'll use pencils to indicate walls and doors and the various bits of scenery replicate those on the drawings pretty well.

The ruleset is structured quite nicely; breaking up each further resolution in rules by subsequent chapters and scenarios. Not quite the "kicking you out of the back of the van, in the middle of nowhere, with only a compass." that some games have felt like.

If you think that it looks ugly, I can point you to the original artwork which, at best, is perfunctory. I still like the design and rules being self-contained and playable from the book as an idea. It's a slightly larger scale than the original tile set, as that probably only had to accommodate pre-slotta metal bases.

It's allowed me to play with the ruleset at least.

The game is really very interesting. It uses the dice to assign different actions, between fighting, blocking and moving. There are risk/reward actions on a 'good' roll, and a large enough variety in the weapons and units to create a very tactical game.

Beyond the point where I've mucked about with it there is a campaign system; negotiating a run through hostile territory or something like that. Only having played it solo it's hard to talk about the depth of the game, but as it reminds me of my time with Deadzone - a much more recent title, I think that there is probably a lot of depth here, for such a concise rulebook. I wonder if Deadzone's designer ever played it?

It turns out that A.A. still sell the game(and all of the figures), in a revised 2.0 edition but as that is 10x the amount I paid for this charity shop find and that the game is still only a curiosity to me at present, I don't really need it.