Video games, I’ve played a few. Miniature wargames that are meant to evoke the feeling of playing a video game? The pod has encountered them before. But only ignition:core goes after the ultimate prize: a Titanfall wargame.
In the space future planet where ignition:core takes place, battles are fought between equal teams of pilots, their kick-ass Warlord mechs, drop-shit delivered troopers and disposable support mechs. What this means in practice is that you have identical amount of units and classes on the table.
The TTS module is a good example. The teams it uses both have a Pilot and their Warlord mech, a dropship with three troopers, and two support mechs. However, the Paladin team’s Warlord can fly and is an anime beast in melee, while the Oni Warlord focuses on firing as many shots as possible. There are six factions in the game, and even if you both played the same one, there’s would be differences in the choice of Pilots, Warlords and support mechs. Pretty sure only dropships come with a but a single design per army. On the other hand, you practically never have unit customization.
Ignition:core is played on a square grid map and with dice pools for determining the results of your attacks and such. But before any of that can commence, you do an initiative phase. You roll dice and put your unit cards (one card represents all of your units of the type) on the initiative track. There’s a somewhat complicated system for resolving ties (when you’re competing for a slot). Once that is done, you know the order of tactical abilities (going from lowest to highest) and then actual activations (from highest to lowest).
Two further things set ignition:core apart. First of, all units have damage locations. Destroying them usually means that a unit loses some capability (with notable exception of infantry, who die if any of their two locations are destroyed, but they’re fairly hard to hit). As critical hits often allow you to allocate damage where you want, you choose to take out a mech’s head to decrease its accuracy. The other thing? Any destroyed unit will return to the table at the end of the turn. They’ll have to start at the deployment zone, but in all respects, they act as if nothing happened. Dropships and infantry as well as Pilots and Warlords tend to have mechanics that interact with the respawn idea. And if that wasn’t Titanfall enough, the Pilots are always much cooler and more capable than regular troopers. Take that, Infinity!
So while the combat in ignition:core can be swingy and/or deadly, in the end, an alpha strike can only do so much. A dropship moves fast enough to reach a strategic point (the goal of the two missions me we tried) in one turn and drop off infantry to capture it. Their survival is, obviously, not guaranteed, but neither is it necessary. Mechs can’t cap anyway. In the end, the key to victory is outsmarting the opponent and rolling well. Since you can control only one of those factors, you should play smart.
Naturally, a game like this is unlikely to stay close to conventional military wisdom. Still, I personally find infantry universally armed with miniguns – or grenade launchers – tad irritating. Another aesthetic complaint would be the chibi infantry. They stand out like a sore thumb, even if the rest of the designs are equally cartoony.
Overall, ignition:core is an interesting attempt at recreating several aspects of Titanfall on the tabletop. The anime approach may be hit-or-miss, but you can’t deny: animes are to thank for giving us giant robots.
