I thought to play a test game of Haywire with the kiddo, then quickly decided it may as well be our first campaign game. So here we are, doing a Tour of Duty in Bazikistan. Task Force Wayfarer has been charged with reviving an old base of operations and identifying the main source of the local insurgency. Our first mission, Operation Reciprocity, saw us arriving to dole out justice against an enemy leader who killed a surrendering soldier.

I intentionally selected a simple mission for our first match. It doesn’t get much simpler than a revenge killing. I, uh… tweaked the narrative a bit. Modern rulesets have this tendency toward being war-happy dude bros in a way that always irks me. Instead of the above reasoning, we’re arriving on the scene and have identified an enemy cell leader. To buy ourselves time to start resetting our base, we’re aiming to take out several high ranking officials so we can take advantage of the ensuing chaos to restart our base of operations.

Note that I’m using temporary models. I have some insurgents to paint and I may just paint up a batch of soldiers for us to use that are properly equipped. For now, we’re making due with the models I already own. They work fine—I just have some really good models I want to print off and paint!

Enemies start on the board as threat tokens (dudes in red), which act as a fog of war mechanic. Until you’ve spotted them, you don’t know what they are. When you do, you roll on the Threat Level table for the faction and current threat level to identify what will spawn. At the start of the campaign, you get Logistics Points (LP) to invest into upgrading your base. I spent them to start up a medical bay and to build a vehicle bay, allowing me to roll on the INFIL chart rather than start in a randomized table corner. We rolled up an option that allowed two models to start in an elevated position, then the rest of the team got to start on any board edge.

We started with a sniper and LMG on the roof. Notably, this gave us immediate LOS on eight out of nine enemy threat tokens. A bunch of rolling later and the above is the result. The one marker unseen defaulted to being the leader and his squad, as we had not organically rolled them up. He’s behind one of the market stalls. The rest of our force came in behind the hotel, giving us easy access to sneaking in the back door and establishing clear LOS on the whole board.

I will note I made two custom rulings here, which probably made the match much easier, but made sense narratively:

1. The hotel has no enemies in it. How else did we get on the roof?
2. The men on the roof are fully hidden until they move or shoot. This was for practical reasons, so we didn’t bog down in rolling a bunch of sightline checks.

Our first turn took a very long time. Not because the game is hard, but because we had a lot to discuss. My son and I spent the better part of ten minutes debating our action plan before finally settling on the obvious: take the hotel, sweep forward to grab the intel in the bed of the pickup truck (visible in the photo above), snipe the leader’s team, and then EXFIL.

We spent our first turn, as planned, moving into our positions. Meanwhile, the enemy leader’s unit randomly moved into LOS of our rooftop boys. Here he is admiring a car in the garage while some civilians look on.

We spent quite a long while planning out our shots. We had successfully snuck into very ideal positions and mapped our target list, including planned redundancies. It was probably the most planning I’ve ever done with the kiddo for a game and it paid off handily. We took out around 60% of the enemy force in our opening round of fire. It helps that a unit can repeat actions, so my son’s sniper was able to take out two models in a row, followed by his LMG taking out another two, followed by his leader taking out a final one, which then triggered his leader’s ability, which then allowed everyone to shoot again. Suffice it to say positioning is key, and a good position makes a huge difference.

After taking out most of the board, we spent a turn doing cleanup, then started out EXFIL.

A little hard to tell, but in the above photo we’re handling a sniper on our way out the door. After you alert the enemy, more enemies spawn. We rolled up an off board sniper who happened to be positioned along our planned escape route. We baited a shot out the backdoor (with a medic nearby!) and then shot back successfully. After this, more enemies spawned…

But with our men so near the exit, we were able to EXFIL just fine.

All told, it was a very clean mission, aided by a bit of luck and a lot of planning. I really enjoyed it. I think the best part is that the game just flowed. The structure is simple and the enemies all use the same statline, which kept us moving quickly. We were also able to take out all high value targets early, so we didn’t have to deal with special rules for the special units, like the Harasser’s Hip Fire rule, which allows him to spray bullets at every visible enemy and apply suppression to them.

We also made great use of our weapons. My son’s LMG pinned multiple enemies, as did our AT Specialist’s explosives. We used the ability of fireteam leaders to pass AP to funnel actions and found that the game really rewarded our planning. It was nothing spectacular, mind, but just enough to chew on.

I walk away pleased. There’s still a bit of narrative play needed, like when I decided the hotel was clear of enemies, but that’s to be expected. Overall, I’m really looking forward to our next mission. Speaking of:

Man, this game really wants me to print off and paint some modern vehicles. Well, twist my arm…