I decided to give a try to something that’s been in my log of Hobby Things To Do My Word It’s Endless for months now: another ~10mm system! Laserstorm, a game by Nordic Weasel, released in April 2024, and is a model agnostic and scale flexible entry into the small scale ecosystem. What compelled me in particular to give it a trial run was that it has solo rules. While solo is almost certainly never going to be as engaging as playing against an actual person, I love when it’s implemented into a system with at least a bit of care, as the reality of scheduling and traveling to games is always an issue and providing a way to putter around by yourself is welcome.
After the initial read, the main design focus of the game appears to be to provide large scale engagements without tedious bookkeeping. The logic being that if a unit is incapable of influencing the conflict for whatever reason, rather than tracking it with tokens or status sheets or anything of the sort, it should just be removed from the table and return later once it recollects itself. This returning to the battlefield aspect is the other big feature I can see in the book, with morale being a seemingly major component. Rather than be whittled down one by one and casually chilling on the spot, units are quite likely to flee or be pushed back after taking one or two casualties, and then attempt to regroup. I like this in concept, and can envision how such a mechanic can result in ebbs and flows of battlefield positions, but we’ll see how it works out in practice!
Like most model agnostic systems, Laserstorm provides a system for constructing unit and weapon profiles, and then point costs for them to build your forces with. Honestly, I think the more I go through these kinds of unit construction rulesets, the more I yearn for a game designer to do the work for me and just provide some units that have been designed and tested to perform a distinct role. Tinkering can be fun, but at a certain point it all begins to blend together in my head while attempting to internalize multiple tables of special rules. Thankfully there is a list of already designed ‘human’ profiles and a smaller selection of various designs which slot into some of your stock ‘alien race/culture’ stereotypes, which are welcome. The former of these are utilized in the provided intro scenario, so you’re not tossed completely into the DIY deep end.
And so to get started:
Laserstorm uses a deck of standard playing cards for activation, with each card representing a battle group and shuffled between rounds. I don’t know precisely what it is, but it feels very immersion breaking to me to play any game like this with standard cards, so it was nice to see the author makes a note that you can use tokens in a bag as your randomization method if you’re not into the cards. In any case, there’s also ‘snap cards’ mixed in that give opportunities for reactive play as well, with specific rules on how to handle that in solo mode too.
Playing through the scenario, nothing here was particularly unusual or confusing to someone familiar with miniature games. Terrain is the thing I find myself usually having issues with in new systems. I’m so accustomed to how Dropzone handles it, as that was the first game of this sort I played, that I still default to thinking in the more abstracted way it’s handled there. In DZC, units are generally ‘inside’ the terrain feature and the exact position of the models is irrelevant unless specifically stationed on an edge. Here, the exact position of the units as they move through any terrain type is maintained, with the rules of the terrain you’re moving through impacting things like whether or not they can shot/be shot at, how much more difficult it is to move through, etc. Nothing complicated, but it’s just reflective of the importance of considering your assumptions as to how things ‘should’ work and that such inherent biases can affect your judgement of newer experiences.
The morale/pushback/recollect and return mechanics came up a bit, and did in fact work pretty well in practice as I had hoped. I’d say it’s the aspect of the system that stood out the most in terms of giving Laserstorm some unique feel, although I am unfamiliar enough with wargame system history to know if it was drawn from somewhere else. Otherwise, there wasn’t anything else that came up as unique selling points in the play itself. The lack of fiddly statuses/tokens/whatever was appreciated, but nothing to gush about. Overall, game played as well as you could expect for a solo mode.
Looking into what would need to be considered if playing beyond the introductory scenario, and army building is a bit unwieldy for me at the moment with all the terms thrown at you: you have battle groups, task forces, units, stands, core/specialist/command/support stands/units, task force commanders, tactical assets, perhaps more things I missed! I found myself forgetting the specifics of a lot of this whenever I circled back to the section while reading through the book.
A particularly interesting bit that obviously wasn’t touched on in this game is the campaign system, available both in standard play and solo. This seems to be something that would work best with a group willing to dive in under the guidance of a game master (and there are rules to support a GM) who plans and manages the campaign, as it appears like it would become too much mental load to track and coordinate things between multiple players. Don’t want to sound like I’m down on it though, it looks fairly robust while still following the overall design ethos of not being overly fiddly, but the nature of such a system means it will just have to inherently have some complexity, so I’d be careful of being overambitious with it!
After playing a game, I think bringing in that campaign mode is really where things could shine. It’s not so much the rules of it that makes me say that, but the problem that comes from any model agnostic system: the framing of the experience. Who are these groups fighting? Why and what are they fighting over? Even if you’re not overly engaging with the story of a game, it provides you some context and motivation, and gives justifications for why certain units behave the way they do. Just playing without any of that feels like drinking something that’s starting to go a bit flat. A sufficiently motivated person with a story they wanted to tell, in either their own or an existing setting that match up with this sort of large scale sci-fi, could have their needs happily met using Laserstorm.
Overall, neat, but I think at the moment I favor systems that you can step into more easily and expect a bit less homework from the start. Game play is straightforward and enjoyable, but I think the customizable approach to army and unit design is a bit counter to the ethos of minimizing clutter on the table: the clutter is instead in the game preparation. This can of course give you more to immerse yourself into, and if you’d like to get into the weeds, both this and Horizon Wars: Midnight Dark can scratch that itch sufficiently. I’ve discovered I’m just not of the inclination to do that as much nowadays!