GunCrawl

I got the GunCrawl Collection in the recent WorldWorks sale and after seeing some nice pictures on the Cardboard Warriors forum, I had to try it. GunCrawl is a sci-fi "crawl" game for one or more players. The map is built with tiles (6"x6" rooms and different types of corridors) with grid-based movement. These features make it particularly simple to run a game using MapTool, so I wouldn't have to print and build all tiles and props first.

Here's my first mission map. The objective was to repair the two computers marked as blue squares on the map, avoiding or fighting the hostile aliens that may be found. The mission had a 20-turn time limit. I had two grunts armed with assault rifles and an engineer with a pistol. I created a single type of alien: fast-moving, with strong close-combat attacks but relatively easy to kill.

My soldiers entered the first room and found three aliens inside. The creatures charged and incapacitated one of Tom, but he recovered at the end of the turn. Afterwards they defeated the three aliens and another two that showed up in the following corridor.

By the 10th turn I had fixed the first computer and was on my way to the second objective. However, now some alien patrols started appearing. The engineer opened the door to the last room and was ripped by one of the aliens inside. Fixing the second computer without him was going to be harder.

On turn 16, one grunt was killed as the other desperately tried to fix the computer. On the next turn, he managed to complete the repairs, completing the objectives of the scenario. I didn't keep playing but I don't think he would be able to escape alive.

Conclusion

My first game of GunCrawl was interesting. The beginning was easy, maybe because my map didn't have suitable corridors to allow placement of patrols (at least until I passed through the second room.) Also, I didn't use the rules for ammunition, which would have limited the amount of ranged attacks I could make in a turn. On the other hand, near the end of the game I would repeatedly roll new enemy reinforcements that slowed me down. I still have to experiment with the threat level system for balancing the number of enemy units on the board.

I felt that the rules for GunCrawl are simple and easy to memorize. They're also very flexible, and can be adapted to sci-fi, zombies, killer robots etc. Generally, all-out aggressive enemies will be well modeled by the rules. Differently from other tile-based crawls, in this game you set up the whole board in advance. This has the drawback of requiring some planning but at least there is no risk of getting stuck in a dead end.