From the earliest days of mankind, warlords and kings alike dreamed of playing a ruleset that was matched with a kickass range of 3D-printable miniatures. This lofty goal has been finally reached by Full Spectrum Dominance, a sci-fi wargame by Giacomo Pantalone and Federico Valsecchi.
Listen to the Fortified Niche episode.
Full Spectrum Dominance is a 6mm wargame where the smallest unit you control is either an infantry platoon or a single vehicle. They don’t all start on the table: in the 60pts scenario we played, 30pts were deployed already, while the rest of the troops and support powers became available in 10 point increments over the following turns. At the start of a turn, you roll activation dice, with the freedom to reroll the results you didn’t like. You then alternate with the other player activating units. For simple activation, any dice result is enough. But units have more powerful weapons and abilities that require an additional dice with a specific result to work. Yes, this is very much like SAGA, but the battleboards are replaced by unit cards and unactivated units can react to enemies. Once activated, a unit in Full Spectrum Dominance can perform two actions, usually movement and a weak attack. Movement is done in straight lines of one 1 DU – “Distance Units.” By default, it’s 3 inches, but since all ranges in the game are expressed in DUs, you can easily change it depending on the scale of minis that you’re using. Units usually move 2 DU or more, so you have option of making turns to bypass obstacles.Combat is easy. You take the pool of dice tied to the attack (the Full Spectrum Dominance uses dice sizes from D6 to D12) and try to roll equal or over target defense score (which can be increased by cover). Infantry is pinned immediately while vehicles wait to see if they fail their saves. For each hit, the target rolls their armor dice (often several) to try and score equal-or-higher. You’ll always be rolling at least a single dice per hit, though if the attacker has rolled a 7 on a d10 and you’re rocking d6s, you might as well not bother. A failed save for infantry means a destroyed base. For vehicles, they’re pinned and then roll a dice on the damage track. This may result in a destroyed system, decreased movement or armor, or straight-up death. This allows certain vehicles to be tougher than others, especially if they have green portions of the health track – repeat hits there don’t result in the vehicle’s destruction. Oh, and pinning means that the unit no longer controls objectives as well as having to spend the first action of their next activation to unpin. Damn, another damage system that works better than whatever GW is cooking these days. But that’s not all for Full Spectrum Dominance. Aside from tactical powers and upgrades in shape of characters, it also features Behemoth units. They have subsystems that have their own cards which have to bypassed to actually damage the core. This makes Behemoths very hard to kill, so they’re both very expensive and also stars of scenarios centered around them. They are not recommended for new players or regular play – even a light Behemoth costs 20pts, which is a third of your army. Again, the devs are very smart. In conclusion, Full Spectrum Dominance is a game I can heartily recommend. It may not have army-scale morale systems, but that’s its only real downside. It also has a major upside: while rules can be used for any setting and mini combination, the “canonical” armies are sold through MyMiniFactory and are extremely cool.
