I’d say once a week or so a game idea pops into my head and I find myself obsessed with it. It usually starts with a setting, then an outflow of mechanics, then forms into an outline for a ruleset. I’m bad at actually doing anything with these but I happen to really like this one so I thought I’d formalize it a little more with a sketch. I don’t have a name for this ruleset yet, so forgive the vagary around a title.

Setting

The world ended due to a confluence of climate disaster, accelerated by failed attempts to control the environment, and a man induced Kessler Syndrome type disaster. This leads to a world where deserts exist next to green plains and frozen tundras, while modern communication and networking are rendered mostly inoperable. Throw some nukes in: I haven’t fully solved this part, I guess. We need a fractured world, one to two generations on, where we’re sustaining ourselves in small communities and barely maintaining the “modern” weaponry of our present day real world.

You play the role of the heads of one of these communities, sending out small squads to do various things: find lost tech or resources, patrol the borderlands, steal, etc. The world is fractured and you’re out only for your own people. We aren’t savages, Mad Max style, but rather just the remnants. You’ll wield assault rifles and other small arms easily enough, but anti-tank weaponry and the like are hard to find and maintain. Not that it matters: tanks are impossible for normal people to hold onto, so they’re out the window. Everyone drives around in beat up vehicles that have been patched and repaired for over a century. Random junkers with an LMG are a reasonable feature of the new, skirmish oriented battlefields.

The world isn’t totally destroyed. Your battlefields will feature shanty towns and desertscapes, but also verdant wooded areas, remnant villages with run down modern looking buildings, or even a well preserved set of modern buildings that managed to survive. You might fight in old office buildings or between the stones of Mediterranean style houses. The goal is to have a wide variety of possible settings.

Game Scope

The bottom line is simple: fast moving, highly ‘lethal’ (high casualty, but not always death), 10-20ish man skirmishes with modern weaponry but without modern support elements. You can’t call for strikes or rely on drones or shoot rockets at each other all day. Small drones exist but because they’re precious and hard to fix they’re mostly used for immediate inspection of the battlefield. Spotting the enemy is very important: you start the game with markers you move around until they’re spotted, at which point you have to spawn a preset number of models in range of that blip.

Games play on a dense 4×4 table and are intended to wrap up in 45 minutes. Missions revolve around objectives, not just killing each other.

Sketching Mechanics

Gunplay will be kept simple and fast: 2DX with the X being your skill, used for opposing roll-offs.

Games start with both sides placing markers down: between 2-4 depending on how scattered you are across the map to start (unsure if anyone would ever pick 2, honestly, so I might scale it to how many models you have). You do not reveal your list to your opponent but you must assign models in the list to markers secretly.

The first phase of the game is the markers moving around freely, ignoring terrain until they’re spotted. Both sides get drones which can zip around during this phase to help spot enemy markers. Once one side is fully spotted, the game begins. Markers that are not yet spotted continue to ignore terrain as they maneuver the map, representing their actual location being a mystery.

Vehicles exist, as do anti-vehicle weaponry in limited quantities. If you bring a vehicle, it does not form a marker and stays on a map edge until that first phase is completed. Vehicles move around normally, have side armor values, and take damage on a chart. They’re mostly mobile LMG platforms at this scale–I might be shoehorning these in in particular, really.

Leaders exist and have fire teams of 3-4 men with them, which are probably what those markers represent in that first phase. In fact, let’s say that’s exactly what they represent. The activation system revolves around leaders coordinating men, which both sides passing back and forth to activate a leader and his men. You can keep activating the same leader, representing an outsized effect on the battle, or switch leaders at will when you activate. Leaders are further important because stress exists in the game, which slowly wears down your troops and may cause your force to break and run.

Your men will vary in experience, with more valuable men having bonus actions they can take–not additional activations, but additional options. A newbie may hide behind cover normally, but a veteran knows how to properly hunker down. Survivability and options will be what sets them apart. You don’t hand an incredibly valuable suicide drone or technical to a new guy.

The game revolves around solving where to place your fires while managing casualties and stress. In the campaign, casualties matter a bit more.

The Campaign

Short. Always short. The campaign will be 6-8 games in length, based around an objective on a map both sides are competing for. You encounter each other along the way and fight.

Both sides get limited special resources they pay for at the start. You might buy vehicles or additional “special weaponry.” You might equip suicide drones, which cost a lot but are very effective, if one use. You might just pay for more bodies.

You maintain a roster of men and as they die off you reduce it. My vision is to have 40ish men–a large platoon. You never commit all of them to a fight but as they die or get injured you risk reducing manpower below the game’s size and fighting with less than a full list. In battle, casualties matter: when a man goes down you need to keep someone near him to increase his odds of living after the battle in the post-battle survival tables. Dragging men off the map will also be an option in case you’re losing and need to retreat.

Leaders will matter and gain some limited special abilities in the campaign. It won’t be “experience” based, but based on the events in your battles. This means some amount of RPG-like play but I’ll likely build a list of “Achievements” to help guide the mindset. Your troops will have an avenue to become leaders but again we are not tracking experience here. They won’t advance through the skill ranks: it’s 6-8 games and no one is going from Newbie to Veteran that fast.

Conclusion

That’s it! This uses a lot of mechanics I’ve applied to various settings and marks a game I’d actually like to take the time to design. I like post apocalyptic settings and fast playing gun-based skirmish games. Modern tech means I can use some modern looking miniatures: I doubt camo is going out of style and it would honestly be neat to be able to play any number of minis free from real world political context.

Alternatively, you could lean into the post apocalyptic look and bring desert nomads or really ragged looking survivors. The vibe is flexible.

Will I ever write or do anything with this? Who knows? I’d need to find a partner I can link up with frequently to iterate and plan it. Making a game in a vacuum is great until, you know, someone plays it and tells you it’s trash.

For now, Vague Post Apocalyptic Game stays a dream. We’ll see where I’m at on it after I get through my current set of wargaming priorities. You never know: maybe this will be the one that actually gets written and fully laid out for once. Maybe.