Good Game #3 - Full Spectrum Dominance

Full Spectrum Dominance is one of those games that just kind of came out of nowhere. One day, under his online handle of The Lazy Forger, Giacomo Pantalone started posting picture of his amazing 6mm scifi terrain and a few early designs for mechs and tanks and, suddenly there was Full Spectrum Dominance the wargame and everyone was talking about it.

Well, not everyone, certainly. This is still a 6mm sci-fi combined arms battle game. There are only going to be so many people in this niche of a niche of our niche of a hobby who are going to even know it exists. But as the author of a 6mm sci-fi combined arms battle game that isn’t Full Spectrum Dominance, I frequent a lot of those dank and shadowy spaces of the Internet where this kind of thing does get talked about and it felt like, overnight, everyone was recommending FSD as a game to play. And yes, yes, OK, I admit it, I’m jealous of that.

I want to put that out there, right away, for everyone to see because - spoilers - I’m going to say some things about FSD that are not especially complimentary and I want you all to know that I know that I may not be 100% objective on this game, perhaps a little more than I’m not 100% objective on any of these reports. So you can judge for yourself whether I’m letting the green eyed monster cloud my judgement on this one.

I should also say that Giacomo and I corresponded a few times. I’m a great admirer of his sculpting and design work on the miniatures for FSD and I take absolutely nothing away from him on that.

But let’s jump into the rules.

First, by comparison with our previous two Good Game reports, this is a much crunchier, more complex game as such games tend to be. Trench Crusade had only nine pages of rules, other than army lists. BLKOUT’s total page count is hard to itemise but the basic rules, when they first dropped were less than ten pages long. By comparison, in FSD’s 89-page rulebook, the rules themselves start on page 14 and keep going to page 47.

And we shouldn’t be surprised by this. When you’re talking about a combined arms, company-level-plus kind of battle game, with different kinds of vehicles, mechs, infantry, aircraft, and issues like command and attrition and reserves and complex terrain, a longer and more detailed set of rules is going to be called for. This is a very different kind of game to BLKOUT and vastly different to Trench Crusade. Although the same player could enjoy both games, they are going to be playing them with a very different approach and state of mind, I think.

FSD has a far future setting in a mature human colony system, cut off from the rest of humanity by a sudden uprising by its AI partner. By chance, it seems, this colony faced a less-well-prepared enemy than perhaps other systems, giving humanity the time to muster and fight back. All the same, the old sureties are gone. The connections to Earth are gone. And now the various factions are fighting as much for what the future of humanity will look like as they are for its simple survival.

However, despite the far future setting there isn’t a lot in the rules to set it apart from any other generic scifi battle game or even to place it in a scifi future, to be honest. Yes, the factions have their particular aesthetics and a few special rules, but you could probably re-skin them to a generic modern warfare setting with little by the way of changes. Although one faction is all robots, there’s no special role for robots in the game. There’s no use of electronic warfare as such. Some units can perform jump moves which are definitely not something that happened in World War Two. But apart from that, it’s very setting-agnostic overall.

The core mechanic is the Activation Dice. And it’s important to note that the game as a whole uses d6s, d8s, d10s and d12s for various actions and weapons, and Activation Dice are normal six-sided dice but are not d6s… Well, that’s what it says in the rulebook. Actually, they are d6s, but you should keep them completely separate from the d6s you use for actions and attacks. And this is the first sign that not all is right with the composition and editing of this book.

Activation dice, basically, should be custom dice with special symbols but, for now, they are regular six-sided dice. The way they work is that you have a pool of dice - usually 12 - and each round you pull a number from these - usually 8 - that you roll and then keep with their number results showing until you need them.

You can use these dice to activate units by moving them to the Spent pile. Some units have special actions they can perform for which you have to have a dice of a given value in your Ready pool to be able to use this action. Or you can allocate a dice from your Ready pool to your units’ special actions. Although this shows your opponent your plan to use a particular action, it also lets you use that action as a reaction… maybe. Honestly, this isn’t clear. It says that a reason you’d want to pre-allocate is to make you better at reacting, but there’s nothing in the rules about reacting that suggests that you can only use a pre-allocated action to react. 

Frankly, it’s not clear why you would want to pre-allocate. It’s kind of implied that you can’t use a special action without having previously pre-allocated the activation dice, but it never actually says that this is the case. And there is another rule about “prepared actions” that seems to have to have a pre-allocated dice and an extra step to prepare them for use.

Speaking of Activation Dice, my other gripe about them, given that they are repeatedly referred to as being the game’s defining mechanic, is that I don’t know what they’re supposed to represent.

Sure, having a maximum of 8 activations each round sort of speaks to the limits of command. But why does that also apply to the entirely AI-controlled robot hive mind? And OK, there’s a limit to my command resources, but a bad roll might mean that I can’t fire the big gun on both this unit and this unit. Why is that my limitation?

And I understand that there’s probably an element of fog of war and human factors built into this, but that’s not explained anywhere in the rules. Also, everyone gets to re-roll any number of their Activation Dice. And there’s nothing wrong with that as a mechanic. But if the dice are supposed to represent human factors, why isn’t there a variable number of dice you can re-roll based on the force’s command value? Because there are units with a command value, which can activate other units without needing an activation dice. But, to make things more complicated, there are also Commander units. Not all units with a command value are Commander units. Commander units do commanding better than non-Commander units can command. Clear?

If you’re getting the impression that I’m a bit frustrated with this whole “Activation Dice” mechanic, you’d be right. And in my previous Good Game reports, I’ve also speculated on how I would’ve done things differently, but if you want to know the answer to that, go and look at Horizon Wars: Midnight Dark, because this has an extremely similar mechanic in the form of command resources. Now, I think command resources are better explained and more logical than Activation Dice in FSD. They are a pool, like Activation Dice. The amount you can get varies depending on the quality of your commander, and subordinate officers can generate more. Command resources turn into orders and orders are used to activate the elements. I think this clearly communicates to the player what is going on. Your command resources combine the efficiency, intelligence and activity of the force commander who then issues orders to their subordinates, some of whom are junior commanders who can also issue more orders. This cascading method of order delivery is based on the military O Group system in which one level of command issues instructions to the next level and so on, giving each level the initiative on how to achieve its orders.

But Activation Dice… I just don’t know what they’re trying to do. And I think that’s a shame, because there is some real potential within the idea of having a pool of dice and having to carefully think about where you can use them and dealing with the fact that you can’t always do everything you want, every turn.

By contrast, a feature of the game that I really like is its damage system. I complained previously about how unnecessarily convoluted Trench Crusade made its damage and injury system. But the system in FSD is very clear. Some units - basically infantry units - that get damaged are just destroyed. It’s brutal in a way that Midnight Dark isn’t, but I respect the clarity. But a lot of units have damage charts neatly positioned at the bottom of their unit card. In those cases, for every point of damage, you roll another dice and look at the damage chart, where the unit could be destroyed outright, or it could have some system damage or be pinned. Red damage is destruction. Orange damage is system damage. Green damage is pinning. You can be pinned as often as you take hits, but take two orange damages and it adds up to a red damage.

I really have only one complaint about this system, which is the choice of red, orange and green markers. I am colour blind and, having printed the unit cards, all of these just look like shades of brown to me. The red and green are entirely indistinguishable at a glance. Now, to be fair, they also have the effects written on them, so this isn’t going to utterly bamboozle me. But it’s a feature that could improve.

I should briefly touch upon behemoths. These are the really big units. They are eye-catching designs that really won FSD a lot of the attention it enjoys today. And they have their own section of the rules. They are monsters and they are really intended for the larger games of 100 points plus, I think. The rules are completely fine in aggregate. In fact, I almost wondered if they were written by someone different, because they’re really clear and well laid-out. I really only have one complaint. You see, behemoths can have a range of support systems and attachments as well as their core, which means that they are represented but as many as five unit cards, arranged in a cross shape, with the core unit at the centre and the add-ons around it. And that just… feels weirdly clunky compared to the rest of the card system. When you add a commander, it sits neatly behind a unit card. So it seems like a design miss to have not made the add-on cards for behemoths somehow neater than they are. It reminds me of the console layout for Polyversal, which is the big reason I’ve never managed to get that game to the tabletop. It just… feels like a massive faff to need to have all of this extra table space just to manage this array of cards.

BLKOUT also has cards, but is playable on a 2’x2’ table, giving you lots of room. Playing this on the intended 2’x3’ table, with your average sized force, seems completely manageable. I’ve got no problem with the cards in principle. But when you add a behemoth I’d just like it to be a bit less of a palaver.

And finally, I have one more dagger to twist in the chest of FSD, which is the use of Distance Units or DUs. Their thing is that one DU is 3” for 6mm play and 6” for 15mm play. And, y’know, I get it. I understand wanting to make your game into something that players can enjoy at their scale of preference. But constantly having to convert “2DU” into “six inches” in my head is quite annoying and feels like a level of friction too far. The game is clearly designed to be played at 6mm. It seems to me like you could have just said “hey, if you want to print your FSD minis at 15mm, just double all of the ranges in these rules”. Abstracting it into Distance Units was, I think, unnecessary.

The game is supported with six factions which each have a very distinctive aesthetic and there is a strong range of miniatures, all of which have their unit cards for inclusion in your army of choice. The size of the suggested starting army is about 60 points, which is going to be about a dozen individual bases - again, about the same size as you’d start with playing Midnight Dark.

And the book has a good amount of supporting fiction to support the setting and encourage you to pick sides. It’s a good-looking book, too, with an excellent balance of original artwork and painted miniatures. Quite charmingly, it includes a few photos of unpainted miniatures, or a mix of painted and unpainted minis, and as someone who is always frantically rushing to paint the minis he needs to put in the photos for his next book, let me say that I admire the decision to just go “ah, screw it” and put down unpainted minis - especially when the unpainted minis are as pretty as the ones that Giacomo has designed.

I’ve given FSD a bit of a shoeing in terms of its rules and editing, and I do need to recognise that Giacomo is not a native English speaker and I believe he has written these rules directly in English, rather than translating them from Italian. He has a long list of credited proofreaders, and even longer lists of alpha and beta testers. So all I can say is: guys… do better.

FSD is not getting a “good game” rating from me. I think the rulebook is confusing and not well written. If this were a free beta, I’d be much more forgiving as I was with Trench Crusade. But I paid real, actual money for a PDF. It was about $10. And I don’t think I’ve been given a game that is actually playable without me either doing some of my own design work to pull it together, or joining the Discord to ask all of the questions that I feel the book itself doesn’t answer.

I don’t expect games to be perfect. Heaven knows, my own games need their FAQs and Erratas and they don’t always get them. But there’s a difference between not understanding how a particular piece of equipment works and not understanding the core mechanics of the game.

But, like I said when I came in, I have some skin in this. As things stand, I think FSD and Midnight Dark are competing very closely. The games have a lot in common. If FSD had the benefit of a good editor and actually made sense, I think there’d be very little to choose between them because you can use the exact same miniatures to play both games. Obviously, I think Midnight Dark is a better game, but I think FSD has one big advantage in the form of its unit cards. It is a lot easier to throw an army together and get going with FSD than it is with Midnight Dark in which you’re going to have to do some administration and planning before you can just hit the table.

The other advantage from the unit cards is that Full Spectrum Dominance doesn’t need you to put many if any counters on the tabletop, unlike Midnight Dark. So if counters distract you from your immersion - and I have total sympathy if that’s the case - then you might prefer FSD… although I would also say that it’s completely possible to create unit cards for Midnight Dark if you really want to, and then you can put activation counters on the cards instead of the table, but…

Anyway, right now: in my opinion, not a good game. Do not buy. But if Giacomo can sort out the rules to be comprehensible as intended, this will be a thinky, crunchy, tactical game. Maybe it doesn’t actually lean into the scifi-ness of its minis as hard as I think it should, but it will still be a fun time.