The player may choose to play their campaign on either side. At one or two points these boxes also instruct us to set up a very simple combat situation to apply the rules, which certainly helps understanding them.Īpart from the game rules the rule book includes a little introduction to the game world and the 4 major races featured in the game: Basics (humans in all their beautiful variety), Hishen (evil, cloned slave traders), Grath (hard-as-nails henchmen to the Hishen), Zhuh-Zhuh (Slightly ape-like aliens, trusted by the Basics). It helps summarizing the points the author wants to get across in this chapter. Each chapter ends on one of these: Assignment questions 2 and 3 may cost philosophically inclined gamers a few weeks to figure out properly. The author is aware of that (well, the latter thing, not the native speaker thing of course.) and makes use of a nifty little gimmick. Maybe it’s because I’m not a native English speaker, and it surely is in part due to the fact that the rules use a unique reaction system, and anything non-linear in a games turn will make explaining them a bit more complicated. The rules are easy to read, but at times have to be read two or three times to grasp them. On top of that we get a big index and 83 pages of rules, including unit rosters and a lot of tables. The counters and the battle board (basically an A4 sized ground texture) are meant to be used for playing the game without miniatures or a gaming table. The rulebook comes with a colour front and back cover, 4 pages of colour counters for soldiers, aliens, vehicles and mechs and a ‘battle board’ for tunnel missions you can print and cut out. Reading PDFs is a pain, but THW are located in the US, and with shipping the printed version most likely would end up more expensive than having it printed and bound here. I liked the idea of Citizen Soldier, so I went for that one. The third, Citizen Soldier, is centered around the player character’s adventures of rising through the ranks to attain citizen status in Gaea Prime.
Gaea Prime First Defense deals with an alien invasion on a human-held planet (rather X-Com. The first covering proper Space Marine stuff: Boarding actions, meeting exotic peoples in exotic locations and killing them, and so on.
There currently are three different variants of 5150:Star Army available (not counting role-playing games or space combat): Star Marine, Gaea Prime First Defence and Citizen Soldier. The latest version of 5150 I had on my hard drive was from 2012, so this purchase was entirely justified. So I bought the latest version of 5150: Star Army, Citizen Soldier. And I’m very much a “wargamer see, wargamer do” type of monkey it seems. Somehow I was in a sci-fi mood, not the least because Cpt.Shandy got way into 15mm sci-fi recently and has been posting very fun looking games over the past months. While ATZ gives a unique gaming experience and I’m not averse to zombie survival gaming, I think that these rules play best with other people rather than solo. Seeing as how these circumstances probably won’t change much in the first half of 2021, I thought it would be a good idea to have a look at these rules again. For many people 2020 was big on solo wargaming due to the pandemic. When it comes to solo or cooperative play THW games are sure to be mentioned.
Those are All Things Zombie (zombie survival), Nuts! (fireteam to platoon level WW2) and 5150:Star Army (squad to platoon level sci-fi). Starting with tabletop wargames with a particular focus on solo and cooperative play, THW in more recent years took the mechanisms and moved them into tabletop RPGs and board games as well.Īmong all of these there are three which are constantly updated and over the years got staggering numbers of expansions, spin-offs and variants. Over the past 15 years Two Hour Wargames, run by the industrious Ed Teixeira, released a ton of rules sets for all sorts of settings and historical period. …or rather 5150: Star Army Citizen Soldier. Today I’ll have a closer look at 5150: Citizen Soldier by Two Hour Wargames. Welcome to the first review of 2021! Hope everybody had a good start into the new year.