Team Bravo: Combined Arms
A 24” x 24" table. Six-sided dice. A tape measure. Any models you like.
UNITS have five numbers, printed on a card and never modified by anything: Skill (2–5), Move (inches), Resistance (0+), Hits, Size (1–5). Plus weapons, each with a Power and a Range in inches.
TURN. Both players roll 1d6; high goes first. Alternate activating one unit at a time. Each unit moves or fires, not both. Resolve immediately. When one side runs out, the other finishes.
SHOOTING. Roll 1d6 — equal to or under Skill is a hit. Then the attacker rolls 1d6 + Power against the defender's 1d6 + Resistance. Attacker higher: 1 damage. Tie or lower: nothing. Armor wins ties. Buildings do not dodge — skip the Skill roll.
SUPPRESSION. A hit that fails to damage costs the target 1 Skill — but only if the attack's Power is at least the target's Resistance. At Skill 1 a unit is demoralised and removed. Lost Skill never returns. Rifles rattle infantry. They do not rattle tanks.
COVER. Terrain that blocks sight, lying between shooter and target, means the target cannot be attacked at all. You need only be behind it, not in it. Model's eye view — use a string. Firing reveals a unit through the end of its own next activation. Everything behind the blocking terrain starts concealed. Units in the same rubble field or building can see each other.
TERRAIN. Two properties: does it block movement, does it block sight.
Failed terrain roll: stop at the edge, activation spent, no attacks.
BUILDINGS are units with a card: Resistance, Hits, what it admits, what it becomes when it falls. No Skill; cannot be suppressed. Attack the building, not the people inside. At 0 Hits it collapses to its rubble state and each occupant rolls Skill or takes 1 Hit. Only weapons of Power 3+ can damage a structure.
CLOSE COMBAT. Range 1. A unit without a printed Melee value resolves Range 1 contact as Ramming.
- Melee — Skill roll, then penetration using the printed Melee value.
- Ramming — no Skill roll, Power = Size, resolved in both directions.
KEYWORDS. Seven. They grant or deny; they never adjust a number.
- Aerial — ignores all terrain, never concealed, never blocked. Only weapons marked AA can attack it.
- Split Movement — move, fire, move. Total movement may not exceed Move.
- Fixed Mount — has facing; fires only forward. Turning is movement and costs the activation.
- Breaching — may enter buildings it otherwise couldn't. Skill roll or take 1 Hit.
- Move and Fire — may do both. A permission, not a general rule.
- Sure-Footed — no Skill roll for rubble, rivers, hazardous ground. Not walls.
- Demolition — not a rule; a second weapon line. Charges — Power 4, Range 1, buildings only, two uses.
VICTORY. Score removed units by Size; demoralised counts as removed. Use a turn limit. Give at least one side somewhere it has to be — without an objective, both players correctly refuse to move.
WRITING A CARD
Skill · Move · Resistance · Hits · Size, then one line per weapon — name, Power, Range, restrictions. Restrictions are absolute: AA, buildings only, Size 1–2 only, two uses. Then keywords. Then what it may enter, if anything.
Melee values for mechs are worked out once, here, and printed as a single number: Size + 0 to 3 for what it's swinging (giant robot fists, plasma sword, wrecking ball, school bus…).
Card text says what a thing IS, never what it ADDS. Power 4 against buildings is a stat. +2 against buildings is a modifier in a hat.
ADAPTING A SETTING
Find the smallest thing that your setting fields. That is Size 1; count up. Anything that stops behaving like a unit is terrain with cards, not Size 8.
Find the fastest thing you'll field. Give it Move 8 and scale down — on a 24" table anything quicker has no approach. Want faster? Get a bigger table.
Then answer seven questions per unit: how competent, how fast, what ordinary fire does to it, how many mistakes it survives, how much presence it has, what it can attack, and the one permission that makes it strange. Write down the answers.
The test is not whether you captured every canonical detail. It is whether the players start making decisions that resemble the setting.
BALANCE
There isn't any. No points costs, no army lists. Asymmetric forces, asymmetric objectives, and a turn limit do all the work — as they did in every battle anyone ever fought. Four squads holding a factory against two tanks for ten turns is a scenario. Work out for yourself who is favored.
A medium tank needs about ten shots to shoot through a mech and dies to it in two. A rifle squad needs two dozen attacks to penetrate mech armor and cannot suppress it at all — infantry are for taking ground, not for killing armor. A mech kills a squad in a single turn and another mech in about five. The chopper is fast, hits reasonably hard, and dies to absolutely anything.
The expendable mech is what happens when a factory ships a hull it has no trained pilot for. It breaks after one bad moment. Do not field it because it is efficient. Field it because the scenario is about that.
Nobody is balanced against anybody. That is the scenario's job.
SAMPLE UNITS
Team Bravo: Combined Arms. CC BY-SA 4.0 — use it, hack it, share it, sell your scenarios. Credit The Grey Ledger Society and the CGCG Helix Coterie of Digital Daemons — greyledger.org