CodeBlade

Today I was finally able to get a full three dimensional game going, and see how two factions with very different abilities compare when going head to head. The plan here is to write up the battle report whilst taking care to explain key rules etc to give an overview of the game itself.

Iron Samurai vs Neon Underground

The Iron Samurai are more traditional from a wargaming perspective. They love to fight. They aren’t slouches in the hacking department, but their main skills and abilities centre around the “kinetic” i.e. physical. The Neon Underground however have very little in the way of physical combat ability. They are hackers and have other ways to achieve their objectives. Reading the rules and looking at the character profiles, I really couldn’t theory craft how best to play them. The only way is to get them on the table and find out!

The game is played on a 2×2 foot board, and it is suggested to have fairly dense terrain. I set up some basic Infinity cardboard terrain for this purpose. The map in the terrain set is 24×30” so I ignored 3” at either end to keep the playing area as intended. For this scenario, two objectives are placed at 9” squares from the corners. I imagine this is some form of “data plaza” given its hi-tech appearance.

First step is to roll for deployment priority i.e. who places their first model first. Iron Samurai won the roll here so they placed first. For the core rulebook scenarios, models can be placed anywhere that is more than 6” from an objective, and 8” from an enemy model. This is very interesting and unusual compared to other games and makes the setup very tactical. You start the game in a ‘lived-in’ kind of world where the characters are already in situ going about their business, before the ruthless AI masters start giving them tasks to do and pitting them against each other.

Once the models are down, each gets two Flow Tokens – each token gives them one action.

The other thing to note at this point is the win condition. You each start the game with 10 Honour Tokens. Honour Tokens are part currency and part ability-boosters and there are multiple ways that these can be won, gained or lost. First to 20 Honour Tokens is the winner, OR first to zero Honour Tokens is the loser, OR if all your models are downed or killed you the loser. Each round a number of Honour Tokens become ‘contested’. The winner of the round scoops them up!

With the stage set, we enter Round 1. Initiative roll to start. The Iron Samurai roll a 3, Neon Underground roll a 4. This gives Neon the first character activation. As the Samurai will be going second, they get to allocate one “Honoured” or “Dishonoured” token to any character on the board. In the main, Honoured is good and can lead to faster accumulation of Honour Tokens, Dishonoured is bad and leads to faster loss of Honour Tokens. A big part of the game is around maximising or negating these conditions. The Samurai place a Dishonoured token on the Neon’s AGI Tracker. With a “Personal Honour” stat of 3, this means she will lose 3 Honour Tokens every time she loses her last flow (or dies) unless she can find a way to shed the condition.

The two initiative rolls added together (so 3+4=7 here) dictates the objective for the round. Looking up 7 on the objective chart and the win condition for Round 1 is “Control any objectives”.

The Iron Samurai’s deployment looked, at first glance, to be advantageous for getting onto the objectives (at this stage I hadn’t twigged that there is a 1” difference in the movement stats of the two factions. Neon are slightly faster. So later in the round I realised that it wasn’t as advantageous for the Samurai as I first thought)!

So my first thought for Neon was to try to mitigate the Dishonoured condition on the AGI Tracker. The loss of 3 honour tokens, plus a loss in the first round would put them right on the back foot. I had no easy way to lose the condition completely, so I activated the Manipulator Hacker first, and used her Hacktivator to try to ‘Disconnect’ the AGI Tracker from the Honour System. This wouldn’t remove the Dishonoured condition, but it would prevent the loss of tokens. This is an opposed roll, so even though the hack is being made on a friendly model, the target’s hacking defenses still kick in. The hack looked good, but AGI’s ICE protected her and the hack failed. The Manipulator Hacker used her Hacktivator again, but the result was the same. The boss’s ICE was just too good! The loss of 3 tokens will now be inevitable and one character activation has been ‘wasted’. Not a good start!

Iron Samurai go next. One Samurai Duellist and the Freelance Muscle spend a flow each to move towards objective 1 (I made a mistake here thinking they had a 5” move and could contest the objective with a single move – but I fixed it later with no impact). At this stage they look highly likely to secure it barring any miracles, but as Neon needs a miracle they’ll take a riskier approach to go for it.

The Neon Underground’s Freelance Medic was deployed on a nearby rooftop, ready to go to work on any injured personnel during the battle. However, the only way his team would prevent the Samurai from taking the objective was if the Medic got in there and contested it himself. In an act of insane bravery he moved to the edge of the building and jumped down onto the Duellist. Falling incurs a kinetic hit so you risk taking yourself out of the game, but he survived the fall. Additionally, because he landed within 1” of the Duellist they also suffer the hit. He could have jumped down out of the Duellists engagement range but he thought he may as well see if he could take them out in the process of falling. Unfortunately for him, the Duellist also survived the hit. Now the Medic is in the Duellists engagement range – he’s successfully contesting the objective but he’s in trouble next turn!

Another Samurai Duellist moves in on Objective 2. The Combat Hacker responds by moving in to contest the same objective. It was at this point I registered that the Samurai had a shorter move than the Neon Underground (and fixed the mistake above). The final Samurai Duellist hasn’t enough movement to get into range of Objective 2 so instead she moves in and shoots her pistol at the Combat Hacker. She rolls 3 dice and gets 2 successes, The Combat Hacker only gets one dice against a kinetic attack, and needs a 5 – but gets it! The objective remains contested.

The Propaganda Hacker has just enough room to double move in alongside the Combat Hacker. The Neon Underground now control Objective 2!

The Iron Samurai’s S.U.M.O. isn’t in a position to influence the objectives this turn, but he thuds down off of his rooftop (using a ladder to avoid falling) and moves into the space ready to intercept the action on the next turn.

Needing to have equal numbers on Objective 1 the AGI Tracker will now need to move in and in doing so there is no way to stop her Dishonoured condition costing her 3 Honour Tokens, but if the Neon Underground win the round, as it looks like they will, she can then remove the condition (the round winner can place an Honoured or Dishonoured token on any character, and adding Honoured to a Dishonoured character cancels the condition).

Due to her Personal Honour rating of 3, she contests an objective when she is within 3 inches. It only actually takes her one move to get into that range. That means she has one action left. She attempts her ability Tokenisation to try to gain an honour token from the active objective, and she is successful. That offsets one of the 3 Honour she simultaneously loses!

End of round – Neon Underground win! Their greater movement plus the crazy bravery of the Medic allowed them to get more characters in range of Objective 2 while contesting Objective 1.

Neon Underground win the two Honour Tokens from the contested pool (each player places a token into the contested pool at the start of each round, and no more were added during the round). As explained before, the Neon Underground give an Honoured token to the AGI Tracker which removes the Dishonoured condition. At the end of the round, both sides are sitting on 9 Honour Tokens apiece. This shows how impactful the Dishonoured condition is. Neon Underground won the round but only ended up all square.

Round 2

Each side places an Honour Token into the Contested pool. The initiative roll yields a 4 for Neon Underground and a 1 for Iron Samurai. Neon Underground will go first but the Iron Samurai get to put a Dishonoured token straight back onto the AGI Tracker! Bad news! The combined roll of 5 means that Round 2 will be Objective 5 = “Surivive!” This is an interesting objective and it’s also not good news for the Neon Underground. Each objective immediately initiates ‘Countermeasures’ and hits anyone within 6” with a Kinetic attack with 5 dice hitting on 5’s (it will also hit anyone entering the bubble during the round). This really should favour the Iron Samurai as they favour kinetic skills so have more chance of defending the damage.

Let’s deal with these hits one at a time. First, the models within 6” of Objective 1:

1. Samurai Duellist. 1 hit. Defended with a critical success (2 6’s in the roll). Gains a Flow token
2. Medic. 2 hits. 1 dice to defend, needs a 5 and rolls a 6. This guy is a hero!
3. Freelance Muscle. Takes 2 hits, defends.
4. AGI Tracker. Takes one hit. Only has 1 dice to defend against a Kinetic hit. Needs a 4. Gets it!

Everyone near Objective 1 survives the countermeasures. Onto the models near Objective 2:

5. Samurai Duellist. Hit with 3 successes! Has 3 dice to defend a Kinetic hit but needs a 6. She spends one Honour Token to add an additional dice. The token goes into the Contested pool. It was worth it, she gets one 6!
6. Combat Hacker. Hit with 3 successes. Also only has one dice to defend a Kinetic attack and will need to roll a 6. Even spending 2 Honour Tokens to add two dice only brings the roll to a 50/50 chance of success. Too risky to gamble so many tokens given the AGI Tracker looks set to lose another 3 Honour through Dishonoured, so he rolls the one dice and hopes. It’s a 5. Fail! He’s DOWNED. “Medic!”. Sadly the Medic is a long way away and for some reason appears to be duelling with a Samurai…
7. Propaganda Hacker. Hit with 4 successes! This means that the roll needed goes to a 6, and removes one dice. She only had one to start with. No choice but to spend an Honour token to have even a chance at survival. Rolls a 4. She’s DOWNED!
8. The final Samurai Duellist survives without even taking a hit.

This round was brutal for the Neon Underground, their low Kinetic skill really is no match for attacks of this scale. (At this stage I hadn’t realised that I could have avoided this objective using a character ability – but you don’t know until you try!)

The Objective table doesn’t give a win condition for this round, it just initiates the Countermeasures attacks. So I will assume there is no winner intended, and the Contested pool remains in place for the next round. So the rest of the round is about vying for position for advantage next round. Or in the Neon Underground’s case, figuring out how on earth to survive!

The Neon Underground are in trouble, so it’s time to take a look at using a CodeBlade (CB) ability. Most characters have one of these abilities on their profile. The challenge is that each faction can only use one CB ability from one of its characters in the whole game. So they need to be used wisely.

The Manipulator Hacker’s CB ability is to give a Stun to every enemy within 10”. With one move she can get in range of all of the enemy models. Giving every model a stun removes one Flow token from each of them i.e. halves the number of actions they can take, which could prevent a landslide loss at the hands of the Samurai swords.

In return, the S.U.M.O. moves in and locks the Manipulator Hacker in combat for next turn.

Neon Underground really need to find a way to take out some Samurai to even up the numbers. The AGI Tracker has an ability called Feedback which is a Hack skill but does Kinetic damage, so it has the potential to take a model out. She aims it at the Samurai Duellist who is locked in with the Medic. She gets one success but the Samurai blocks it easily. Their Hack skill of 2 isn’t too bad and was more than enough to defend. She tries again, and entirely misses! To cap things off, in using her last Flow, the Dishonoured condition means another 3 Honour tokens lost.

The Duellist in combat with the Medic swings her Katana at him. 2 hits. Blocked! She has a Flow left due to the one she gained with the earlier critical success, so she swings again with 3 successes. The Medic gets the 6 he needs and survives! The only thing he is carrying that passes for a weapon (of sorts) is his Defribillator. He swings that at the Samurai, the first swing she blocks, the second misses.

With superior numbers, the Samurai have the last two models to activate. The Freelance Muscle shoots AGI Tracker with his pistol but has the hit blocked. Finally the last Samurai Duellist moves closer to the action on Objective 1.

End of round – Samurai have 6 Honour tokens, Neon have 3 and the Contested pool of 6 stays in place for next turn, but it now looks like Samurai have a huge advantage as a result of the two downed Hackers.

Round 3

Initiative roll. Neon Underground roll a 3, Iron Samurai roll a 2. Neon really wanted to lose that roll in order to clear the Dishonoured token, but alas not. They’ve “won” all three initiative rolls and it has been bad news every time. The AGI Tracker has an ability which allows her to add 1 or subtract 1 from the initiative roll, but that wouldn’t help here. If the roll is tied, initiative stays per the last round. However, there is another reason that she might want to modify the initiative roll. The initiative roll dictates the objective. Remember what happened last time we rolled 5? Oh yes, we have learned that Neon Underground DO NOT want that objective, and henceforth I will ensure they don’t face it! So she changes her roll to a 2, making 4 in total. That makes the Objective = Secure Objective 1. ‘Secure’ means to control an objective with no enemy models in range of that objective.

The Manipulator Hacker once again tries to hack AGI Tracker to disconnect her from the Honour system, but once again fails. With her second action she needs to make a run for the objective or there will be no chance of denying the Samurai the win. This gives the S.U.M.O a free attack (because she started in engagement range of him). His attacks go from non-lethal to lethal if he gets 4 successes so he spends an Honour token to add a 4th dice to have a chance of that result. He only gets 2 successes and they get through the defense roll. This gives a Stun token to the Manipulator Hacker so that means one less action next turn. S.U.M.O activates next and charges AGI Tracker. This not only gives him a free melee attack on her, but gains him the Powered Up condition (allows rerolls) and puts him in range of Objective 1. His attack is successful, so the Stun token takes effect immediately and AGI Tracker loses a Flow.

AGI Tracker activates and uses Tokenisation again (gaining an Honour token now will prevent them hitting zero when the 3 are lost after her activation). She is successful, and the net result is that Neon Underground are now down to 1 Honour token.

A Samurai Duellist moves into combat range of Manipulator Hacker and also the objective. This means the Samurai have superior numbers on the objective but they need to clear all enemies to win the round.

All the medic can do is swing the Defbrillator at the Duellist. First swing is a miss. Second swing hits but is blocked. The Duellist swings back with a critical success! She gains a flow, but the Medic blocks the attack. The Samurai swings again. Hit and blocked again! She uses the bonus Flow to swing for a third time. This time it’s a critical fail! This means the attack misses and the Duellist gains a Stun token! The Duellist near Objective 2 stays on her roof, which she patrols alone, in case the Objective is needed next turn but shuffles closer to a ladder so she can head the other way and join the action if needed. Finally the Freelance Muscle moves into the Manipulator Hacker and swings his cybernetic hand at her. It is a heavy blow which she fails to block. She is DOWNED!

End of the round and while the Samurai Control Objective 1, they haven’t Secured it. This means that Neon Underground end the round with 1 Honour token, Samurai have 5, and there are 7 remaining in the Contested pool. More importantly, the Samurai are at full strength, but Neon Underground only have two of their crew remaining.

Round 4

Each side puts 1 Honour into Contested pool. This takes Neon to 0 so they must gain Honour this round or they lose.

Initiative roll yields 6 for the Samurai and 1 for Neon. Neon finally can go second and take the Dishonoured condition off of the AGI Tracker. It’s not completely over yet, but Objecive 7 is ‘Control any Objectives’. Not good news for Neon but at this stage I am not sure which Objective would be good news for them!

A Samurai Duellist spots the Medic looking at making a dash to revive the downed Manipulator Hacker, so in an act of ruthlessness she swings at the downed Hacker, hits and kills her and moves in to engage AGI Tracker.

Needing Honour to stay in the game, the AGI Tracker ignores her attackers and focuses on leaching Honour from the objective using her Tokenisation ability. Two successes, two Honour!

The Duellist with only one Flow (because of the Stun last round) swings at the Medic. It hits but he just won’t go down. The Medic swings the defibrillator back at her twice but she blocks the hits.

The Freelance Muscle moves in and swings at AGI Tracker. He hits, she fails her defense, she is DOWNED! Only the Medic remains!

S.U.M.O charges the plucky Medic. The Samurai are now guaranteed to win this round. This puts a faction in a doubly advantageous position, because they can spend Honour to power up their actions, with certainty that those tokens will come back to them when they scoop the Contested pool. S.U.M.O powers up his attack to try and win the overall battle now. He just has to hope that the extra dice don’t lead to a Crit fail! He spends 3 Honour to increase the attack to 6 dice. Only 2 successes but no Crit fail. Going for it all he uses Powered Up to reroll the dice. 5 successes! The attack now gains “lethal” instead of being non-lethal. Due to the number of hits, the Medic needs to spend 1 Honour to even roll one defense dice, still needing a 6, he does so. Rolls a 3. He’s DEAD! For completeness the Samurai on the roof runs back to claim Objective 2 to add to the already claimed Objective 1. Not necessary given the Samurai have already won by downing all of the opposition.

The final Honour score was 14-2 to the Samurai – a landslide victory whichever way you look at it!

A fun game with lots of learning (plenty of tactical mistakes included) and I hope the walkthrough was helpful in sharing the nature of the game!

Tokens for the game are provided by way of a Token Sheet download from NeuroCraft Studios website.  I’m not a veteran of creating my own tokens so I pondered about how best to do it.  In the end I decided to get the token sheet printed onto a heavy 400gsm paper via Doxdirect, and I bought a hole punch tool from Etsy which matched the size of the printed tokens (in this case 13mm).

It took a bit of trial and error.  To start with, despite repeated whacking, the tokens wouldn’t cut cleanly.

Then my wife, seeing my frustration, decided to put me to shame by cutting a few out with her trusty scissors.

I didn’t want to be defeated however, and I had no desire to write to Jeremy Clarkson and inform him that I had found the one problem in the world that couldn’t be solved by hitting it with a hammer.

Inspired by the Clarkson method, I had an idea.  I need a bigger hammer!

Bosh.  Two whacks of the big hammer, with a 90 degree turn of the punch between whacks, and it was cutting nice and cleanly!

I have a couple more sheets printed, so if I can be bothered I might punch another set and glue them back to back to make them double sided.  I can then also replace the dodgy cut ones with nicer ones.  Not a priority for now though, there are games to play!

The third faction is ready for action!  Will be very interested to see how these play with their hacking mechanics.  The picture is a little blurry but I’m fine with that given they are the board game plastics that I whizzed up in a hurry!  Bad photography hides all sins 😂

Time to get another faction into production.  Neon Underground seems like a good choice as I am very keen to test their hacking mechanics and seeing how that competes with the more physical factions.  Human Interface minis are perfect again, and for expediency I am going to throw paint onto the PVC board game minis to get them on the table.  If all goes well, I’ll come back and do a nicer job on the metal versions in due course.

If this project ever appears on the Unofficial Hobby Hangout, particularly before I get to the metals, I will have to hack into @sundancer ‘s system and disable the MOULD LINES button!  Don’t judge me!! 😂

SAGA!!

While I look at some slightly more interesting terrain options, I picked up some mega cheap Infinity terrain so that my next game can be fully 3 dimensional.

Very much a test game to start with, learning the rules and taking time to work out what each model could do.  I used a 2×2 game mat from Core Space, and used Human Interface floor tiles to proxy as buildings (I called them all 5” high each).  I also used the Human Interface tokens as proxy tokens.

I didn’t consider for one second that I would batrep this test game, but part of me wished I did.  Even though I played both sides (it is designed as a 2 player competitive game), it was an incredible game.  It left my mind boggling with possibilities and desperate to play it again.  I want to try out the control based factions, and explore the full extent of the mechanics.  A game hasn’t done that to me for a very long time.  I’m trying to temper my expectations for now, but based on game 1, this could be a very special ruleset indeed!

I won’t “review” the rules here – I hope to discuss them via a batrep in the near future (once I’ve got a proper board setup etc!).  In this game the Compliance Officers got off to a very fast start, but the Iron Samurai managed to turn the tide by winning the attrition battle, which stopped Compliance just before they reached their win condition.  Samurai eventually won by downing all of the Compliance Officers as they retained superior numbers and made them count.

Very interested to see what happens next time!

I planned to have a run through of the rules in full proxy mode, even with unpainted models.  Very unlike me, but I was too excited to test these rules.  I sat with the rulebook and the box of Human Interface models and started seeing which models would be suitable for which factions.  Then a very happy accident occurred.  I remembered that I had taken some of the Human Interface models the other year in order to take my first steps into painting with oil paints.  Turns out they were perfect for two of the factions in the rulebook!  So they are now CodeBlade models!!  Say hello to the Iron Samurai faction and the Compliance Officers!

I created the two forces to match the models primarily, but also chose to squad build quite equally.  The squad point value for each model is based on their “Personal Honour” characteristic, and you build to a value of 10.  So I chose to build each squad with one model with a value of 3 and three with a value of 2.  That gets to 9.  Then each squad took one model from the Freelancers faction which has a range of models with a value of 1.  I took a “muscle” freelancer for each squad to make a total of 10 PH for each squad.

Interesting to note here, is that the Iron Samurai and the Compliance Offices (and also the “muscle” Freelancers for that matter) are the most ‘traditional’ in terms of wargames.  That is they major on ‘kinetic’ skills which means physical damage.  Outside of those two, there are factions that major on Stealth or Hacking skills – these are control mechanics.  There are factions that have hardly any kinetic skills and are almost 100% control.  That will be very interesting to explore, to see how that works and balances with the objective play.

CodeBlade gives you character profiles and a token sheet you can download and print, but otherwise leaves you to source your own miniatures, terrain etc.

Now, I picked up the Human Interface: Be a Better Human kickstarter a few years ago, and have been meaning to throw it out ever since.  I decided I would cannibalise it for anything I could potentially reuse for CodeBlade (or any other games for that matter) and put the rest in the bin.  So I took floor tiles, tokens and of course all of the miniatures.

I picked up the CodeBlade rulebook pretty much on a whim.  It was cyberpunk, it was available, I bought it.  The designers, Neurocraft Studios, have a website which contains some background lore and the initial downloads for the game, but aside from that there is very little social media presence and no battle reports (yet).  It really is that new.

And I am so glad I did pick it up on that whim.  It’s very promising indeed!  One read through of the rules and I got very excited.  Time to explore!