Breaking through!

While I was looking at my collection of rules, I found out that I had never tried the Gunstorm solo skirmish rules by Spacejacker. So I picked up some miniatures and set out to do that. Instead of chits for phases and wounds, I used cards from a common deck. Not as simple to manipulate as I had to keep shuffling the wound deck, but usable.

In my trial games I just used two squads of regular soldiers with light armor, assault blasters and no stunts [other stats were Shoot +2, Fight +2, Sprint 0]. The enemy squad must break through my defenses and escape through my board edge.

Enemy on the left, my squad on the right.

In the first game, I forgot to roll the guts saves when a model was hit. This, combined with drawing only "dead" counters, resulted in a very lethal game. The enemy crossed the bridges but was defeated before escaping. The game played in 15 minutes or so, and this made me want to play a bit more.

In the second game, the guts save rolls made the enemy survive longer, and they even killed more of my troops, but in the end, did not complete their objective.

For the third game, I decided to use Aleksandar's alternate wound resolution, presented at the end of his battle report for Gunstorm. This completely removed the need for a wound deck. The result was a faster game as I did not have to reshuffle the wound deck. If using chits, I suppose the speedup would have been minimal. As I was using a small number of figures, the game played a bit longer as one-hit kills were less likely.

I used dice to mark bleeding wounds.

Conclusion

I liked Gunstorm, even playing with basic troops. The game plays quickly and the solo mechanisms work well. I liked the movement table, which makes the enemy more cautious as they lose units. The variable turn sequence is another favorite mechanic. My only doubt is about the use of the "power" stat for ranged weapons, as I did not see it mentioned anywhere in the rules.