My recent posts highlight my homebrew starship miniatures game, but before War In Space I started developing a platoon-level infantry combat game called Atomic Africa. The name comes from my intended setting: an extremely unlikely "what-if" scenario where the Cold War goes hot, starting in the Congo of 1960. As I developed the rules set, I realized its generic nature allowed players to use it for any modern or future setting where technology allows soldiers to move in small teams and still apply sufficient firepower. Since the rules cover so many potential settings, I figured I'd post them here for others to try. I enjoy them and hope you do too. If not, hey, it's free.
Atomic Africa is a platoon-level infantry game. Although it should work with as little as a single squad of troops, or as many as an entire company, it is specifically designed around a 30-40 man platoon led by a single officer. Platoon and leader experience feature as key components to game play, and therefore encourage campaigns which depict platoon development over multiple battles. Psychology greatly influences how troops act, making the rules generally unsuitable for any "far-future" games where man fights strange, truly alien races (unless your game group decides aliens react just like humans to battle...). The design philosophy focuses on avoiding any kind of paper record keeping and chart referencing, relying instead on numerous but simple props. Finally, I wanted to avoid repeated die rolls: "roll to hit, now roll to penetrate armor, now roll to wound, now roll for shock, now I roll for morale to recover from shock, now roll for..." you get the picture. My game requires only one dice roll to resolve a unit's fire, defense, and sometimes even movement, but the roll always involves three dice, sometimes of totally different types. Not a "bucket of dice" system, but a warning to those who prefer rolling 2d6 at most.
I designed Atomic Africa for 15mm figures in true scale. What I mean is that all figures and terrain are 1/100th of their real-life size, and ground-scale and figure-scale are the same. My 125cm by 200cm table thus represents a rectangle 236 meters across from its opposing corners. Obviously this creates a tight game, one where vehicles and artillery rarely make an appearance, and then usually only as objectives. Rules exist for both however, even though players should use them sparingly.
Atomic Africa requires a number of items to play besides 15mm miniatures, terrain, and the obvious game table. Additionally the game requires playing cards, polyhedral dice, suppression markers, wound markers, and measuring rods.
The game requires a standard pack of playing cards (Jokers included) for each player.
I recommend three 4-sided, 6-sided, 8-sided, 10-sided, and 12-sided dice for each player. Ensuring each player has their own dice avoids passing dice around the table and slowing down play.
I use cotton balls for suppression markers, but players can get fancy and make their own distinct tokens, as long as everyone understands what it represents.
Wound tokens must be distinguishable from suppression markers. I use small scratchbuilt casualty tokens made from Durham's water-putty. Any appropriate, consistent counters will do (glass pebbles, plastic "puddles" of blood, piles of skulls, etc).
Finally, go buy a 48 inch dowel rod, ensuring it is straight (I try to stick to metric units only, but the home improvement store where I shop labels the dowels in imperial lengths). Cut it down to 1 meter; keep the smaller portion and set that aside. Take the longer dowel and make a mark 5 cm from one end. Make a second mark 10cm from the end, another at 20cm, the next at 35cm, and the final mark at 60cm. This dowel is your range rod for resolving weapons fire and is split into six bands. I paint every other band black so they're easy to differentiate. Take the smaller dowel and make marks evenly spaced at 2.5cm. Cut off the excess at the last mark; the rod is now divided into eight equal bands. Paint alternate bands; this is the movement measuring rod.
Atomic Africa requires no pen-and-paper record keeping during game play, but normal attributes still define the fighting units; these attributes are the topic of the next post.
Atomic Africa is a platoon-level infantry game. Although it should work with as little as a single squad of troops, or as many as an entire company, it is specifically designed around a 30-40 man platoon led by a single officer. Platoon and leader experience feature as key components to game play, and therefore encourage campaigns which depict platoon development over multiple battles. Psychology greatly influences how troops act, making the rules generally unsuitable for any "far-future" games where man fights strange, truly alien races (unless your game group decides aliens react just like humans to battle...). The design philosophy focuses on avoiding any kind of paper record keeping and chart referencing, relying instead on numerous but simple props. Finally, I wanted to avoid repeated die rolls: "roll to hit, now roll to penetrate armor, now roll to wound, now roll for shock, now I roll for morale to recover from shock, now roll for..." you get the picture. My game requires only one dice roll to resolve a unit's fire, defense, and sometimes even movement, but the roll always involves three dice, sometimes of totally different types. Not a "bucket of dice" system, but a warning to those who prefer rolling 2d6 at most.
I designed Atomic Africa for 15mm figures in true scale. What I mean is that all figures and terrain are 1/100th of their real-life size, and ground-scale and figure-scale are the same. My 125cm by 200cm table thus represents a rectangle 236 meters across from its opposing corners. Obviously this creates a tight game, one where vehicles and artillery rarely make an appearance, and then usually only as objectives. Rules exist for both however, even though players should use them sparingly.
Atomic Africa requires a number of items to play besides 15mm miniatures, terrain, and the obvious game table. Additionally the game requires playing cards, polyhedral dice, suppression markers, wound markers, and measuring rods.
The game requires a standard pack of playing cards (Jokers included) for each player.
I recommend three 4-sided, 6-sided, 8-sided, 10-sided, and 12-sided dice for each player. Ensuring each player has their own dice avoids passing dice around the table and slowing down play.
I use cotton balls for suppression markers, but players can get fancy and make their own distinct tokens, as long as everyone understands what it represents.
Wound tokens must be distinguishable from suppression markers. I use small scratchbuilt casualty tokens made from Durham's water-putty. Any appropriate, consistent counters will do (glass pebbles, plastic "puddles" of blood, piles of skulls, etc).
Finally, go buy a 48 inch dowel rod, ensuring it is straight (I try to stick to metric units only, but the home improvement store where I shop labels the dowels in imperial lengths). Cut it down to 1 meter; keep the smaller portion and set that aside. Take the longer dowel and make a mark 5 cm from one end. Make a second mark 10cm from the end, another at 20cm, the next at 35cm, and the final mark at 60cm. This dowel is your range rod for resolving weapons fire and is split into six bands. I paint every other band black so they're easy to differentiate. Take the smaller dowel and make marks evenly spaced at 2.5cm. Cut off the excess at the last mark; the rod is now divided into eight equal bands. Paint alternate bands; this is the movement measuring rod.
Atomic Africa requires no pen-and-paper record keeping during game play, but normal attributes still define the fighting units; these attributes are the topic of the next post.
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