Skirmish: Wallet Friendly Wargaming

Thanks for all of those questions! Some of these are good catches based on proofreading errors we made in the text – late-game Skirmish went through a lot of rewrites, so we’re very thankful for the help in getting the final text updated.

1) Yes, as written this does allow you to move things infinitely. Good catch – the Field Officer should only be able to use its Weathered Blade ability through the effect of Opportunist. We’ll add this to the update log.

2) A Honywood unit on a Dusthorse is considered a combined unit, so will only take damage once from area of effect skills as you describe. Wasps are considered combined units during the Action Phase, and so a stack of Wasps will only take damage once from a single area of effect attack.

3) Yes, all of the Hardpoints need to be on the map, so you cannot deploy an Ovatten with four complete hardpoints on the very back row of your deployment zone as the rear hardpoint will need space to be deployed. Hardpoints are considered part of the unit and so will block movement, so if there’s a one-space gap in cover then the Ovatten will be unable to move through it without destroying the cover first. It’s a big machine! Incidentally, this is why the Bunker Breaker attack on the Heavy Caliver instantly destroys cover.

4) Another editing thing we missed in the last stages of the book – originally the terms defined in the Glossary section were divided into Unit Characteristics, Actions and Keywords, but as the only two Keywords we had were Vulnerable and Resist we ended up folding that into the general action glossary. We missed that while we were changing everything else to match!

Since we’ve started work on other things in the Skirmish system we’ve started using Keywords again, so consider Vulnerable and Resist the only Keywords in the core book. Spell of Forgetting consequently removes any Vulnerable and Resist a unit has, as well as any effects applied to a unit like the Sidekick’s I’m Innocent!.

5) No, as being used to power an adjacent Lantern’s attack counts as taking an action. Let’s say that we have four Lanterns in a square formation as follows:

1 2
3 4

If 1 uses Consuming Passion, then only 2 and 3 are adjacent to it, so the attack will deal 5 damage. As 2 and 3 are now considered to have acted, 4 is unable to use Consuming Passion as there are no adjacent Lanterns who haven’t acted this turn.

6) Multiple uses of Slink Away do not stack, so you will only block the next instance of damage and move up to 2.

7) Yes.

8) The rules for the limitation of five connected pieces of cover are constantly active, not just during setup, so you would be unable to use Geomancy to block off the battlefield without clever positioning. Damage is not healed when Geomancy is used to increase cover size, so a piece of half cover with one “health” left will still be destroyed in one hit from anything if it becomes full cover through Geomancy.

9) Yes. Multiple sources of Resist and Vulnerable stack, so if you used two Reveille! on a unit it would have Resist 2 for a turn.

10) Yes. As they have no units left to command, the player will be considered Tabled and will lose the game. With regards to the matchup between Machinist Core and the Followers of Untruth, it’s a bit of an uphill battle if you only have one Ovatten, but in our testing we’ve seen the matchup isn’t quite as one-sided: the Ovatten will be able to consistently outrange the Prophet and destroy it without much difficulty due to its lack of Resist.

11) It should hit the unit on the cover. Another editing catch – the Molotov’s second ability should state “deal 4 damage to all units within or adjacent to that Cover.”

We were attempting to get a Tabletop Simulator client running, but encountered some issues getting things working and the dev we were working with has had to drop the project due to time commitments. In the meantime, to play Skirmish remotely pretty much any client that can create dice and a grid – like TTS – can be used as a stopgap. We don’t currently have any plans, or honestly the ability, to make an AI to play the game, but perhaps that’s something we’ll look into if we restart client development!