Here’s a curveball: I wrote another game. No, I can’t stay focused. No, I won’t take further questions not about the game.

Death by Plasma Strike (DPS) is a skirmish sized scifi game set in a setting that will probably change over time. For now, know that it happens in an alternate reality science fiction setting with many races, where Citizen Action Corps (CACs) represent the common interest of normal citizens against Business Interest Groups (BIGs). On the political field, this means fierce participation in government, bribery, and… sometimes… unleashing Impulses. An Impulse is a deniable squad of loyal (whether to credit or principle) soldiers who represent the utmost elite on offer. Each Impulse is composed of two Vectors, which are fireteams built to the specific mission and led by a Vector Lead, which is a more heroic character capable of shifting the battlefield while leading their Vector.

In other words: you compose fireteams led by heroes. Each battle is normally two of these fireteams (Vectors) and revolves around an objective.

The real selling points/design focuses of the game are intended to be as follows:

1. Focus on mobility – units move fast by default and most mechanics revolve around limiting or increasing maneuver.
2. High customization – you build your units down to their statlines and rules, then use them to build vectors.
3. Clean, simple rules that stack well and encourage a game of positioning and objective play.

I think the key example of this is in two pieces: movement and fireflies.

Each model activates three times in a turn and may move repeatedly. Standard movement is 6″ base (for now) but you can buy your way up to 12″ of movement or add keywords to make it even faster. Terrain is easily crossed by paying the price in 1:1 for ascent and no cost of descent. This means a model can readily cross 36″ of board space in a turn on a 4×4′ board. So how do you deal with it?

Fireflies. Fireflies are small drones kept on your belt, which you launch to either act as a smoke effect (smoke + electronic jamming, etc.) or a loitering munition ready to hit a passerby. Smoke gives you the ability to bypass a pesky overwatch, while the loitering munition threatens enemy movement with a roughly 30% chance to hit–just enough to threaten without dominating.

I’ve built other mechanisms and tools to help. As I playtest, my goal is to keep the game mobile but give you just enough to enable you to intelligently lock down an objective through crosslines of fire and loitering munitions.

Now, for the game with the kiddo.

I did my standard test mission for most games I write: progressive scoring across three objectives. I started strong by taking two and holding them in force.

Only for my son to make good use of a skill combo he thought up: his leader can command a nearby unit to fire a second time within a turn, so he positioned that leader with his LMG toting ‘Gunner Drones’ (his name). They uh… they did good.

I should have used smoke more wisely–or, I should have used loitering munitions to force him to move the darn things. His really clever move was to put smoke directly on the objectives, which allowed him to sit on one objective without being shot. I had to force a melee, which I lost. Unfortunately, I didn’t grab a good photo of that engagement.

He won out in the end, successfully eliminating my whole force before also meeting the objective score threshold first by one point. Granted, I played a little sloppy to test lethality–the game is pretty lethal already and I may have to consider toning it down just a touch or perhaps reworking the points accordingly.

Speaking of, this is the first game where I’ve tried to do something I… am not sure how people will react to. I vibe coded an HTML list builder.

I’m not sure how I feel about it. I need to do some actual coding to fix the fonts and text but it was silly how easy it was to get this together. I built an Excel with my data like I usually do, then just… fed it to an AI and told it what I wanted. A few rounds of trial and error later and I had the above readily made. Granted, it apparently shortened my special rule descriptions and I need to go back and edit the code to fix that, too.

If I were to sell this, I’d likely pay someone to either clean up the code and make the cards prettier or rebuild it altogether and make something nicer. But for playtesting or just playing with my son? This is so great it’s silly.

To explain the card itself just a touch: you set your move, armor, shooting, and melee skill in that order as it appears. You then select both a primary and secondary weapon weapons and their munition types, which modifies them. Here, you see the Battle Rifle has the Laser munition, which gives it the ability to reroll failed hits with the opponent gaining armor as a result. Its skill is “Precise” which allows it to ignore intervening terrain (that is entirely my fault on the data I fed it). You then also see he has a small melee weapon with the Disrupter munition, which instead of wounding suppresses. Great example of the customization I intend.

So where do we go from here? Uh… I play a couple games with my son and then totally forget this ruleset I really enjoyed, duh. Maybe. I’ve long held a desire to finish one of these things. This one is the grand sum of a lot of ideas into a single distillation and… I like it. It’s low hanging fruit and pretty simple but gosh if we didn’t have a good time. We’ll see.

In the mean time, here’s a link for the builder in a very raw state if you’d like to futz with it or tell me how many ways the AI messed it up: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1f-nY8h8AjdqpVqST8jTA3lGls-rlIjzX/view?usp=drive_link

You should be able to download it and open it in a browser. Again, some descriptions are overly abbreviated and I need to do some manual coding on fonts and such. Lots pending there. If this pans out, I’ll likely end up just posting a free document and builder. I doubt I’ll see this one through. But hey–it’s been a fun project with the kid and that’s always what counts.