Spectre Operations – not Specter Operations – is now three editions old! Haven’t played the previous two, I was the perfect guy to give it a spin. The dev of the previous two e’s had split and so the game was written anew. What can you expect from the hardened operators and middling militias in Spectre Operations V3/3E/third edition?
Listen to the Fortified Niche episode.
Spectre Operations is largely about teams of Tier 1 (or Tier 2 – that’s apparently a thing) operators quietly shooting their way into a compound, grabbing the intel, and running away. Actually, not shooting anything at all is a desirable outcome as just like in Red Powder, Black Earth, nobody is immortal: infantry out of cover is already dead, just doesn’t know it yet.
But there are rules for more than just running and gunning. You can choose weapons precisely fit for your task, equip gadgets that tap into technologies of the near future, deploy with/in vehicles up to tank in size, and you may even attempt to infiltrate in a disguise. As the situation deteriorates, you may even call in dangerous Escalations, ranging from reconnaissance drones to chemical MLRS strikes.
As far as the gameplay goes, Spectre Operations runs Momentum. Each unit that’s not suppressed or pinned generates two Momentum points that can then be assigned freely. Imagine if Infinity orders allowed only one Short skill per, but each unit generated two. You can spend as much Momentum as you want on a unit, but you can’t switch between them – if you stopped spending Momentum on that fireteam, it’s done for the rest of the turn. You don’t need to splurge, however: unspent momentum is used for reactions.
The tests work on D10 roll-over and Momentum can sometimes be used to boost them. Tests are usually based on stats – movement, ballistics, situational awareness (SA), stress. Lower is better for everything but movement (and you don’t test movement). And while ballistics and stress can cover the entire 1-10 range, movement and SA are fairly constrained. No matter how hard you train at the Warcrime School For COIN, you won’t move that much faster than a regular dude, and since SA is mostly a save, you can’t really learn to dodge bullets.
Troop profiles in the game are split into two types – Untrained and Trained – and those then go more granular, with the former featuring Civilian, Criminal, Conscript and Militia. Outside of statline differences, certain in-game actions either have modifiers based on Trained or Untrained status, or are outright impossible (usually to the Untrained).
Weapons are much more complex in Spectre Operations: they have range, to-hit modifier, lethality (chance to actually take out a dude), and AP – and all those are different per range band, of which there are three. Notably, AP here is meant for damaging vehicles; to ignore body armor, you need Armor Piercing, a weapon tag. Yes, it’s confusing. No, it doesn’t get any better.
But that’s the issue with Spectre Operations. While it offers some tantalizing opportunities, like having undercover agents ride up to checkpoint in a civilian vehicle and then pop out to shoot the guards with compact rifles, the book is absolutely unwilling to let you play with them. There’s confusing terminology like AP not being Armor-Piercing, unclear rule interactions (can you covertly infiltrate in a civilian vehicle?) or lack of rules (how exactly does deployment work?) and stuff like specialized military vehicle crews being mentioned once and never again. And the FAQs barely address these questions!
At the post-op debrief, Spectre Operations turns out to be the equivalent of a Khyber Pass G11: it’s hard to tell the flaws of an ambitious design from the questionable craftsmanship of the finished product. With a few more editing passes, we’d have a clearer answer. But for know, we have known unknowns, unknown unknowns, and crew rules gone AWOL.
You should consider covering Rogue Warriors by Tabletop Skirmish Games. Similar in scope and lots of fun.