Good Game? #2 - BLKOUT

I first stumbled across Enemy Spotted Studios back in around 2019. I can’t remember exactly how I ended up on their website, but I think it was from an Instagram post of one of their minis and I found myself exploring and, as a result, bought a few of their early minis: digitally rendered and 3d printed in resin. They were great but, it turned out, a little too large for my needs at closer to 35mm than the 28mm of most of my collection, so they languished in my display cabinet.

Still, I was paying attention when they successfully Kickstarted a game called Killwager, not least because it was unnervingly close in concept to Horizon Wars: Zero Dark which had, at this point, just released and I was honestly a bit scared of having my thunder stolen. But Killwager didn’t stick around for long because, shortly after this Kickstarter, Enemy Spotted more or less confirmed that they were shelving it for further development and, instead, pivoting to a new game, BLKOUT.

Like Killwager, it was set in a near-ish future roughly a hundred years from our present on humanity’s first extrasolar colony world. I won’t go into the setting in detail, but it’s basically low-intensity warfare between various mercenary and terrorist (or freedom-fighter) groups while the UN tries to assert dominance. BLKOUT adopted all of the design objectives of Killwager whilst trying to distance itself from the features that made Killwager fail - those basically being that it was a ferociously complicated game to learn, with an enormously high barrier to entry.

By contrast, BLKOUT landed with extremely simple rules and when deciding if a game is, in fact, good, this is where I like to start.

BLKOUT’s core mechanic is the skill check. The base skill check is to roll 2 d10s and compare the results of each to the skills stat of the unit in question. So, for example, if your model has a skill of 6, you need to roll a 6 or higher on at least one of the d10s for success. There are situational modifiers, like cover, that can allow you to roll more d10s or, indeed, fewer. But you always get to roll at least one. And if you roll a 10 it counts as an extra success.

When shooting, more dice that exceed the skill check value means more successes and for each success you look at the damage stat of your model and that's the number of hits you've got. Your opponent might get to make an armour check. Armour is described with two numbers, such as 2/6. The first is the number of dice you get to roll and the second the skill check value you need to reach. But there are no critical hits on armour rolls.

A key feature of BLKOUT is that the vast majority of models that you’re going to put on the table have only one damage point. So, if your opponent hit you for three damage and you only have one damage point, if you are only rolling two dice for armour, you're out of luck. You dead: one hit equals death. In practice, of course, this is ultramodern warfare so “death” doesn't necessarily mean the existential end. What it means is that this model is no longer capable of participating any further in this exchange and will need to be extracted for urgent medical attention. But they might also just be dead.

This is what we refer to as “lethality” in a wargame and is something that BLKOUT very intentionally imported from Killwager.

The rules as a whole are extremely light, but gradually gaining weight. When BLKOUT first dropped, the rules were super light. Very sparse indeed. And I would go so far as to say that, at that point, this was not a good game. Games were resolved very quickly, with a typical mission lasting less than 30 minutes. But there was little satisfaction in success at that point. Victory seemed to fall more to luck than tactics and, because forces are small, if a lynchpin unit goes down to a flukey roll, you could rapidly find yourself wrapped up and defeated with neither winner nor loser feeling like they had a great time.

However, ESS has been continuously working on development for the game through updates to its core rules and through additions to those rules via expansions. We’ve seen additions like mechs - that are called “dusters” in the game - and mercenary specialists. We’ve seen the gradual introduction of electronic and digital warfare. We’ve seen smoke appear. And, my favourite, we’ve seen the addition of non-player hostile characters to mess up your collective plans. Whilst they’re no Zero Dark Red Force, and you can’t yet play the game solo, they are a lot of fun.

There are still, however, some significant omissions from the rules.

One of the big selling points of the game is that it’s supposed to be written by, or at least informed by, US military veterans. And that’s one reason for the lethality, which I respect. But as a former combat medic myself, it’s hard to have to see a small squad suffer casualties and just… ignore them and press on. The lack of consideration for the role of the medic and the importance of the buddy system in ultramodern warfare is disappointing.

Similarly, the lack of any kind of psychology rules seems like an oversight. When the game advertises its lethality, it seems odd that its participants don’t seem to recognise that same lethality that could make them freeze, dive for cover or be pinned into place by suppressive fire, even if it’s not accurate enough to actually injure anyone.

I tried to bake these features into the rules for Zero Dark through the damage and stress systems and these are far from the most complicated element of the Zero Dark rules and a version could easily have found its place in BLKOUT. Now, to ESS’s credit, they are experimenting with more advanced rules for wounding and damage but the experimental rules are… well, they’re not good.

Finally, the implementation of dusters and electronic warfare was odd. As a designer in the same space, I recognise that it’s hard to move from squishy, fragile human to massive stompy robot within the same rules set without having some serious balance issues. I know. And you could see this caution when dusters were first introduced as an optional unit. And, more recently, they’ve been added more assertively, but with smaller versions of the original dusters that have been rebranded as “heavy” dusters (still optional) versus the new “medium” dusters that can be added without an opponent’s permission.

This is just weird to me, given that they already had the even smaller “interdiction suites” (basically light dusters) in the Killwager range and rules. Why they threw heavy dusters in without realising that 20-foot killing machines might not be the best choice for elite squad skirmish is baffling. And why they just mostly ignored their existing interdiction suites is equally baffling. The interdiction suites are back, by the way, in the most recent version of the rules, so they got there eventually. But… well, like I say. It was odd.

And electronic warfare was also odd. It was first added in the form of a “data spike” that could simply take away a unit’s primary activation with a successful test. No range. No line of sight. It was such an obviously overpowered ability from the moment it was invented. Eventually they clarified that the data spike could be opposed by an enemy who also had a data spike. And then they added a data knife that was like a very short range data spike that could also do damage.

But being tentative is fine. What was odd was that they clearly had plans that were more ambitious than this from the start. The game included some units with special attributes, like Powered and Drone, which had no actual rules associated with them, because they intended to eventually make it possible to hack powered armour or drones and shut them down or, perhaps, take them over somehow. You can see equivalent rules for hacking in Infinity, of course, and in Zero Dark and in other games, too. But ESS doesn’t seem to have wanted to take inspiration from any of these.

Enhanced electronic warfare rules are slowly entering the rules, but they are still distinctly underwhelming.

I’ve had a bit of a moan, so let me pivot to talk about what I really like about this game. And, perhaps surprisingly, it’s a design choice that ESS took that I very consciously and explicitly rejected for Zero Dark: fixed unit composition.

Army building in BLKOUT is incredibly quick and simple. Each faction has a very limited number of units to choose from. Each unit is represented by a card. You pick a number of cards based on the size of the game you want to play and the job’s a good ‘un. Technically, you can’t have duplicates of cards but, in friendly games, there’s no reason not to. Seriously, army building takes less than five minutes and three of that is spent deciding which duster you want to include.

Not only that, but the designs of the units are refreshingly straightforward. Units only have three stats: skill, movement and armour, then they have weapons and some have extra special rules. Weapons have a range and a damage and, with some exceptions, that’s basically it. What this means is that making your own custom units is extremely easy once you’ve grokked the rules. And although ESS would really, really much prefer you to play the game with their miniatures, because that is how they make money, you really don’t have to. And lots of people are proxying minis from Anvil Industry or from Infinity - particularly in Europe, where the import costs and duty make it hard to access the game until ESS secures a vendor on this side of the Atlantic; something, by the way, that I’m genuinely surprised they haven’t done yet and which, given recent events, seems unlikely to happen, now.

In summary, the rules started poorly but are now definitely good. They have some way to go, still, to achieve their true potential, but players are definitely going to have a fun time.

A bit like Trench Crusade, though, BLKOUT is a game that sells itself on a vibe. And that vibe could not be more different from Trench Crusade’s. Where Trench Crusade has gone deep into the grimdark steampunk medieval fantasy vibe, BLKOUT is pitching itself as grounded, near future sci-fi. A lot of the featured weapons are from real-life manufacturers or are closely based on real weapons. The technology is indisputably sci-fi, but the aesthetic is one familiar from movies like District 9, Elysium or Chappie. ESS wants its players to believe that this technology is imminent and believable. And, for the most part, they do this well.

Their rules, as mentioned, don’t quite gel as tightly with the vibe as I’d like them to, but they’re getting there. The miniatures are absolutely terrific, though.

Personally, I actually prefer the slightly grungier look of the old Killwager range, which is still available on a print-on-demand basis. The newer releases are a little slicker: a little more Titanfall and a bit less Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. But that doesn’t make them bad designs and if I could own all the minis from both ranges, I absolutely would. I particularly like the older interdiction suite designs, but the other Killwager infantry minis would look great in games like Zona Alfa, Spectre Operations or, obviously, Horizon Wars: Zero Dark.

In the modern game, the factions are Harlow, Mantikor, Boone and the UN. Harlow are South African mercenaries, Mantikor are Russian mercenaries, Boone are US mercenaries and the UN... is the UN. Each faction has its particular strengths and weaknesses. Harlow is fast, Mantikor is tough, the UN is good at everything but small in numbers and Boone... actually, I've never played Boone, so I have no idea. And there's also the UN Reserve battalion that is hilariously outmatched by pretty much everyone but trying to compensate with electronic warfare and a very cool interdiction suite. I love the reservists. They're basically just the regular inhabitants of Abol more-or-less forced to do the UN's dirty work who just want to go home and not be shot at. Very relatable, I think.

And given that this is ultramodern warfare, ESS has done an excellent job of giving each faction its own distinctive look. I'm hopefuly that the other factions from Killwager will eventually find their way into BLKOUT, but I'm not holding my breath.

I want to talk, also, about accessibility.

Given that all the designs are 3d printed, you might have thought that ESS would go the same way as Factory Fortress (who, by the way, are the publishers for Trench Crusade) and release their minis as STLs - but no!

Even though they are 3d sculpts, you can only buy them as physical models, mostly cast in resin but occasionally available in white metal. And on the one hand I think this is awesome, because I love physical minis, especially when they're metal. But on the other hand, given the whole "trade war" thing going on right now, this is going to make it very hard to expand their market outside the US.

But their rules are mostly available for free, with only the supplements needing you to spend money to get the PDFs. And, like Trench Crusade, as already mentioned, this is an eminently proxyable game.

So, all in all, is it good?

Yes, it is! This is a good game. It's not yet a great game, but it's on its way there.