Well, it’s Tuesday, which means I missed posting yesterday. It was a busy day, and, in fact a busy week – since I was too busy last Monday to make this post. Its about how to play Heroic Mode ACP164, and there are some announcements at the end.

I should state at the outset that the core Combat Patrol game doesn’t have this type of approach. We used it first because we wanted to run a participation game for Partizan in 2019, as opposed to having a brilliantly set up table that people could watch for five minutes as they strolled by. And it was actually quite popular. We ran several sessions, with multiple players in each, and introduced a bunch of people to our new game.

The basic principle is that you compress the game into a smaller space, and instead of using squads, you have individual miniatures associated with the action dice. This makes for a smaller, tighter game, which uses the same rule set.

Setting Up for the Game

The Almata Campaign Book – seriously – you didn’t buy it yet? Contains lots of heroic scale scenarios – in fact, most of the first Arc is at the small unit level. This is because it was based on the RPG campaign that I ran over several years, and I wanted to try and maintain the feel of that campaign in the miniatures game. Here’s an example:

So, this skeleton scenario contains all the information you need to set up – in this case, there are three factions involved. The nature of the campaign is that, depending on gameplay the EDF or ILR could be insurgent or security. There are activation rules for the AHG faction, and if you only have two players, there are also rules for how they will act autonomously. But I digress.

Once the basic table is set up – and it could be anything from a city street to a jungle clearing, just use what you have to hand – the next step is to determine what units each side has. As specified in the scenario, draw an action card, or roll a d10 to see how many points you have to spend. Note that this is likely to give one side more figures than the other… that’s because a fundamental principle of ACP is that life is often unfair.

The next step is to choose – or randomly select – hero cards from the stash available to you. In the campaign book organisations, which you can download for free from the Sally 4th website there are hero cards prepared for each faction. As you can see from the card below, the hero card is laid out exactly the same way as a regular unit card. The “HERO” tag at the bottom gives the game away. Professor Jiro has a one time ability – which is explained in the sourcebook – but this one is not particularly useful in this type of game.

In fact, all the OTA that have been defined so far are more useful in larger games – and of course, you can also use hero figures in larger games bu paying a point for them. All hero cards cost one or two points depending on their stats and armament. As part of the work I’m currently doing to rationalise some of these ‘special rules’ I’m codifying the right way to cost your heroes, and that information will be included in the new campaign supplement, which should be released in February.

I’ve also included a blank unit card, if you’d like to make your own heroes. All the weapon data are contained in the rulebook. It probably doesn’t need saying, but using a bit of common sense will repay dividends – maybe choose a range of weapons suitable to the campaign you are playing. Machine guns don’t work well in Covert Ops, for example.

Playing the game

From now on, the game plays as normal. Assign action dice to each of your selected unit cards, and each of them moves and fires as a squad, using the normal activation, movement, combat and morale rules. Perhaps counterintuitively, do not use optional rule 3.16 – this only applies to hero cards when used as units in a larger force.

When the game is over, a lot of the optional rules can be usefully applied here. If you selected a medic as part of your team, they can be used to save incapacitated heroes from death. (Section 3.19) The improvement rules in 3.20 and subsections are very applicable here, especially if you are playing in the context of a broader campaign.

That’s it.

Heroic mode is an easy and effective way to play ACP164, requiring very little investment in terms of miniatures, but perhaps a little more creativity. I actually feel that it moves the game a little closer to ‘cinematic’ games like Pulp Alley rather than a more formal wargame style. I hope you have a go and enjoy it.

Extra News

Part of my busy-ness has been working on developing the game a little more. To that end, there have been some… er… developments:

• Website is re-established: www.albedopatrol.com is now live but lacking content. I’ll be developing that over the coming months, starting with content that supports some of these blog posts.
• Vehicle Project is ongoing. I expect that three new vehicles will be available as STL files in the coming weeks. The light truck is ready to go. The Heavy Truck is just now completing testing – it’s remarkably complex to turn a play project into something other people might want to print. Finally, the police truck that I started out with is still in first round testing – oddly, it’s quite complicated.
• A new addition is a command variant AV-4 developed by Deniper Graves, and there will also be an AV-4 variant for download. This is part of the process of creating new or variant models for all the vehicles used in the game, as well as new vehicles to let you play in early war campaigns.
• Finally, the first of the new pocket money campaign books ought to be available in February. This is the jungle warfare book, now titled Deep Green