Review: Grimdark Future Star Quest

If you've not discovered One Page Rules yet, I suggest you take a look at their disruptive approach to Warhammer-style wargaming; free rules, army lists, and online army builder. You can also join their Patreon to get access to STL files for all their miniatures, although the games are miniature-agnostic and you can use whatever you already have. (There are also expansions, campaigns, and card figures to download on DriveThruRPG here.) Grimdark Future and Age of Fantasy occupy the same ecological niches as Warhammer 40,000 and Age of Sigmar respectively, but are different enough to avoid copyright problems; each is available as a full-on wargame, a skirmish wargame, or a quest-based adventure game. But enough evangelism, let's take a look at the SF adventure variant.

In a Nutshell: Solo/co-op SF skirmish wargame with RPG elements, broadly similar to Stargrave or Five Parsecs from Home in what it tries to do. 20 page PDF available free here.

Core Mechanics

Most things a character ("model") wants to do require a successful stat test; roll 1d6, if the result is the relevant stat or higher, it succeeds. Circumstances may apply a modifier, usually +1 or -1.

Combat has multiple steps; attacker rolls to hit, defender rolls to block, attacker rolls to wound, once a model has taken as many wounds as its Toughness it is removed from play.

Not much happens outside of combat, because that is outside the scope of the game - you can buy and sell gear, and that's about it.

Contents

These are the contents for the Beginner's Guide, which is what I would recommend you  download as it has all you need (except army lists) in one file. You can download the various parts as individual files, mostly 2-4 pages each, but it's just easier to get it in one place.

Welcome to Grimdark Future (1 page): A few paragraphs of setting information. It's grimdark out there and everyone is shooting at each other.

Introduction & Contents (1 page): What the game is, how it's intended to be played, and a table of contents.

Basic Rules (11 pages): General principles, preparation, actions, movement, shooting, melee, wounds and morale, terrain, special rules. A few black and white illustrations of key rules such as unit coherence and movement.

The main preparation steps are building your group of heroes and their enemies; for this, you're assumed to have access to the online army builder, found here. The army builder can also be used to track your heroes' progress as they advance. I was disappointed not to see a manual hero building option; it's clear that you pick a model with the Hero special rule, pick a class (those only seem to exist in the Quest versions of the games), and adjust the gear carried by picking upgrades, but beyond that I'd need to do some analysis.

The NPC AI is simple and straightforward; if you can see an enemy, close up and shoot them or charge them, if not and you're near an "AI Goal", run towards it, otherwise do nothing. The AI Goal might be a location on the table or an objective marker.

Campaign Builder (5 pages): Campaigns and progression (i.e., experience points and advances for figures), mission setup and objectives (primary, secondary, things you might find as you wander around), deployment, optional hazards, random events.

Each campaign consists of 2-4 chapters, each chapter has 1d3 missions, so you'll have somewhere between two and 12 games in a campaign. Each mission has a primary and secondary objectives, such as attack, defence, retrieval, safeguard an objective, scavenge items, and so on. Characters gain XP for achieving objectives, and use those to buy stat increases.

NPCs enter the board in waves; one is set up initially, and the longer you take to achieve your objectives, the more of them turn up. Each wave is a random selection from the enemy list, and again you're assumed to have access to the army builder, which generates waves on request. You can set various difficulty levels; a higher setting means more enemies, but also more XP.

...and we close with a page advertising other products and providing a link to the website.

What I Liked

• Free rules, army lists, and army builder; miniatures agnostic.
• All the games use essentially the same rules, which are fast and simple.
• Mission objectives and random events are surprisingly varied.

What I Didn't Like

• I would've liked to see some sample heroes and army lists as an appendix. Not that they're hard to make in the online army builder.
• I would also have liked some guidance on how to build heroes without using the online army builder. (It looks like most things cost 3 points, with +1 Quality and being a Caster costing 6.)
• I've never been a fan of armour saves in wargames, but I suppose when your target demographic is Warhammer players, you have to make some concessions to what they're used to.

What I Think

This could well be the first stage of a cycle I've seen before, starting with En Garde!. A skirmish wargame or duelling game appears, then gradually evolves non-combat elements to justify the fights, then people realise that is more fun than the combat, and the combat rules gradually fade into the background, leaving the downtime and social elements still in play. Then people like me get nostalgic about the days when you could just kick the tyres, light the fires, and stab orcs, and a new skirmish wargame appears.

If I were still playing Warhammer 40,000, I wouldn't be, because I would've switched over to Grimdark Future some time ago. It's not likely I'll play either again, although the skirmish (Grimdark Future Firefight) and semi-RPG quest game (Grimdark Future Star Quest) are both tempting. I could play either in Roll20, and maybe someday I'll be allowed back on the dining room table. A man can dream.

Meanwhile, I'm casting around for a campaign and scenario engine for solo play, and maybe GFSQ would do the trick. Once I've got either the table or Roll20 back again, I'll try it out.

If you want to see the game in action, there's an example battle report here on YouTube.