Unfortunately, we don’t get many games about uptopian warfare. Why aren’t we pushing around plastic fighting figures for a better future? But while you’re pondering this philosophical nugget, you can play Dystopian Wars, the steam/atom/???-punk game of naval combat before the missile age!
Dystopian Wars is set in an alternative 19th century. All the great powers got drunk on alien tech and formed giant coalitions armed with massive ships. They’re all trying to avoid kicking off a great war, but that doesn’t mean that your boats can’t engage in a skirmish or two. And when it comes to playing out such conflicts, you’ll be sitting down at the table, alternating your unit (often squadrons) activations and rolling lots and lots of specialty D6 dice. When you’re shooting an enemy, your goal is to score multiples of their armor value. So if the enemy is armor 5, you need to score 5 hits to incur 1 point of damage, 10 hit for 2, and so on. If you score higher than the ship’s citadel rating (a 5 armor boat can very likely have an 11-point citadel), you also roll for crits. They can cause more damage as well as make the ship lurch forward, disable its defenses, and so on. Since you need to score multiple hits to cause any lasting damage in Dystopian Wars, you need to concentrate a unit’s fire. This can be done with weapons with identical capabilities. You may not feel like doing it initially as only the Lead Weapon will contribute all its dice to the attack, but trust me, it works. It’s better for all the cruisers in the unit to fire all of their batteries at a single target rather than each boat – or, God forbid, turret – do an individual attack at an individual target. So having ten guns on a ship doesn’t lead to insane micro – they’re most likely to be fired in two groups at two targets. Still, a ship statline in Dystopian Wars can be very intimidating. The keyword section may not carry that many effects by itself – for example, “British” and other country markers only matter for battlefleet composition – but they can half-a-dozen abilities, both active and passive. Moreover, some of those abilities may have nested affects that influence wildly different areas of combat. You may, for example, have an ability that allows your ship to resist Disorder (chaos breaking out due to crit effects) and also allowing you to fire guns at full power when your ship is crippled. You’re supposed to remember both of those effects.At least the army building avoids some of the pitfalls of more famous competitors. Your force is split into battlefleets, some of which are more restrictive when it comes to unit choices, but come with their own benefits. And those benefits are, largely, in the composition: an airship fleet may not be your main fleet, but it allows you to take a formation of nothing but flying units. Such snazzy formations may also have their own special benefits, but they’re only used one per game. So you don’t really need to waste brain power trying to remember which unit belongs to which detachment that gives it three different special rules. Plus, as I have already mentioned, combat in Dystopian Wars isn’t just about regular surface vessels. It also includes submarines (of the more ancient, just-a-boat-that’s-mostly-underwater variety) and dirigibles, autogyros, and other heavier-than-air craft. All of these are of substantial size, but mercifully not governed by wildly different rules. In fact, smaller combatants like fighter planes and such are abstracted away as tokens that you place on targets.Dystopian Wars is a neat and modern Victorian sci-fi counterpart to Battlefleet Gothic. It’s much more intuitive, doesn’t bother with tracking munitions or launched craft, and the players are free from the tyranny of looking up charts. While the universe itself doesn’t exactly spark my imagination, heck, I’d still play it.
