All Quiet on the Martian Front
So a few days back, I posted images of
some of the miniatures for All Quiet on the Martian Front, the new 15mm wargame
from Alien Dungeon, with the intention of actually providing a review of the
game when the rest of the miniatures arrived (Which should have been the end of
the week at the latest), sadly the miniatures have not landed yet, but given
that the game is going on general release as of now, It would be a shame to
withhold the review until everything had arrived. Thus there will be a post in later days that
shows the miniatures when they arrive.
However, playing with the miniatures
that I’ve already got, there’s enough of an idea for me to be happy about doing
a review on it. I just couldn’t field
all the Martians because it would have been a rout within seconds…
Much like the story itself really…
The first thing I noticed about the game
is that they haven’t skimped on the production values, the main book is
spectacular, full colour throughout with separate sections for the background
fluff, the rules, and then the scenarios and a painting guide.
They haven’t got in the direction of
Warhammer with the “This is our catalogue, you really want to buy these
finecast models…”, but it’s apparent that there’s a good number of miniatures
and they’re at least reasonable in detail.
With the chosen scale of 15mm (for those not familiar with the scale, 15mm
means that the infantry are 15mm tall, it’s the usual scale used for historical
games) rather than 25mm, the scale for Warhammer, it’s possible to have a
Tripod on the table without having to raise the roof to get it on the table,
although in the case of some of the larger models, there’s still going to be
space issues.
So rules first, determine initiative and
then one side does their entire turn, which consists of move, attack, move,
with the second side following after that and so on. It should be noted that the Initiative roll
for the humans is modified by the events of the preceding turn, making it
entirely possible for a good round to let the humans win the initiative for the
round after and turn what was a bad situation into a terrible situation for the
invaders. Martians never get modifiers to the Initiative rolls, but also do not
suffer from morale or panic checks, so it evens out over the course of the
battle, and it’s a nice nod to the idea that the humans might just seize the
initiative if they found they were winning rather than just being juicy little
humans…
Combat is a simple affair, D10 base,
every model has a Defence value and an Armour Value, roll equal to or greater
than Defence to hit them in the first place, roll equal to or greater than
Armour to damage them. Most stands only
have a single wound/structural point, so damage it and it goes down. Most weapons that aren’t artillery are within
the 30” range band, so things get up close and personal fairly quickly, and
while Martians have a massive edge when it comes to technology, they really
have no edge at all on numbers, and it’s here that the system works well. If it were all base numbers no matter what,
then the Martians would roll over the humans every time, but the humans have
versatility on their side, and given the number of them on the field at any
given time, it’s possible to have so many humans running around that the Martians
are just trying to sweep them up before they get close enough to do real
damage. With the possibility of using clamp
tanks to hold the Martians in place, the whole system is reasonably well
balanced, and with even sides, the battle usually goes down to the wire.
That said, sometimes you get spectacular
moments, such as the point in one of the early tests where a squadron of rough riders
managed to attach tow cables to a group of tripods, and a follow up battery of
fire caused at least two tripods to have to move, which resulted in their
immediate destruction very much in the manner of the land speeder assault from
Empire strikes back.
There was much glee and the bikes are forever
after called Rogue Squadron J
What immediately struck me about this
was that there’s true versatility in the human forces, from fast moving troops
to sneak attack to heavy armour single units that can take on whole sets of
tripods, making for the possibility of having all manner of different battles
with just the basic set. The Martians
are less versatile, but given that to get new tech they’ve got to place a call
back to Mars, that had a good degree of logic to it. Their weapons are engineered to hit a number
of humans at once, with the heat rays having two different methods of attack,
direct shooting or sweeping the ray across a number of targets in a manner
reminiscent of the tripods in the 2005 film of the same name, shorter range and
less damage, but more targets. Then Black smoke launchers and Gas bombs
affecting multiple units.
There are no additional army lists
required, no additional purchases, get the basic set and you’re good to go,
which is suitably refreshing for those just coming into the game and while the
deluxe manual is worth every penny, it’s not required to get going on the game.
I’ll stress now that I’m not a
miniatures man, I don’t collect and paint these things until my default vision
setting is “Squint through a magnifying glass”, but I can appreciate a nicely crafted
miniature.
The smaller models are cast from metal,
it’s not finecast standard (and for the difference in price, I’d expect it not
to be) but the detail is there. The
larger models are easy to assemble (even from a man who doesn’t do this
regularly), and every tripod comes with a full set of every one of the weapons
that it could use, so it’s possible to change the tripod configuration every
time you use it without causing any problems. The rest of the models are easy
to assemble, some do require some glue, but most of the multi-part models will
snap together if you’re not of a scratch build inclination.
That brings me to the scenarios section
of the main book. There are ten
scenarios at the back of the book (Eleven if you count the introduction), which
give some idea of the basic games that can be played, ranging from entrenched
humans trying to stop the Martians rolling over them to the dispatch runs where
fast attack humans do their best to get past overwhelming numbers of the Red
Invaders. Victory comes in the form of
achieving an objective, not amassing victory points, with each scenario having
a specific point and not several scattered ideas and that in turn helps to
promote the idea that both sides aren’t just turning up for a scrap.
The final section of the main book is
the painting guide and it’s a beauty, I can summarise it here…
Here’s some we did earlier, go on the
website for detailed hints…
That’s it, and to be honest, I prefer
that to a massive guide that just takes up more pages and ends up costing more
to print.
In all, in the games that I’ve played so
far, which have been limited in scale by the size of the forces that I can
field, it’s been tremendous fun, the system is simple and works well for fast
moving fights, you’re not rolling 200 dice every time your infantry unit opens
fire, and it’s possible for practically anything to damage anything, which is
essential to a game like this.
At the point of completion of this
review, there’s only the basic models available, but there’s a number of
expansions planned, price point is reasonable considering that they don’t have
thirty years in the trade to work with, and now they’ve got all the basics out
of the way with regards to production, I suspect that there’ll be a lot of
support out there for this.
The forums can be reached at http://robotpeanutstudios.proboards.com/ and when you see the discrepancy between the number
of posts on the All Quiet board and the other boards, you’ll get some idea of
how popular this is likely to be.
The sets can be found at
And in the meantime, anyone in the
Yorkshire area wanting to spend an evening in the company of the music of Jeff
Wayne whilst blowing stuff up, get in touch…
