Planetfall Rules Impressions

Spartan’s Planetfall has been out for a few weeks now, and so I’d thought I’d throw in my impressions of the rules. Granted, this is a little outside the normal scope of topics here (not many ships in this game!), I thought it would be appropriate given the obvious tie-ins with Firestorm Armada. So, what follows are a list of my thougths as I went through the rule book. Here we go!

Movement

• Things are very maneuverable, even more so than the land vehicles in Dystopian Wars. It seems like most units int he game have 360-degree movement.
• Coherency is very close..only 2 inches for ground units and 4 inches for air. This is going to tend to cause units to clump up a lot more, since they have to practically be in base contact to satisfy that 2″ requirement. This is also the tightest coherency I’ve seen in not only a Spartan game, but just about any minis game I can recall looking at!
• Raming is now a thing, which makes sense. Interestingly, it works differently than in other Spartan games. Instead of the ramming causing damage directly, the attack causes disorder tokens to be placed on the target (more on these later).

Sky Drops

• This is a neat mechanic, that wraps up off-board support like artillery and “deep strking” units together in a single set of rules. There are some issues with these rules in the books as written, looking at the forums, but those weren’t immediately apparent to me when just reading the rules.
• Sky drops always deviate, it seems.
• They are placed at deployment, making it hard for arty strikes. You really have to plan ahead with these!

Disorder

• The order/disorder rules in this game seem to be much more…severe than even in DW 2.0. If a unit has disorder tokens on it at the end of a turn, they become damage tokens instead!
• Passing disorder tests requires getting a number of successes equal to the number of tokens on the unit..which is more than the usual one or two we are used to seeing (potentially).

Close-Quarters Combat

• The name suggests something akin to hand-to-hand combat, but in fact it works just like another shooting.
• Has a 4″ range, and interestingly an enemy unit can initiate these attacks in certain situations (kind of plays with the activation sequence a bit).
• Initiating a CQC attack does not prevent you from also shooting in the next phase.
• The book comes right out and says that you should skip this section and move on to the shooting section of the rulebook, and then come back to the CQC section….huh?! That struck me as  a bit odd.
• Stompy Robots! Robot models can use a special CQC attack.

Ordnance

• Weapons in this game all combine, instead of linking. Less math!
• In one of the most significant change from previous games, shooting is now targeted at units, not individual models. This means that hits will end up being allocated among models in range of the attack. I’m concerned that this could open Planetfall to the some of the same allocation shenanigans that have plagued 40k for years, but time will tell.
• Shields: For the units that have them, shields combine as well. Again, no linking!

General Observations

• Like DW, you round up in this game (I really wish SG could just pick one convention on this and stick to it!).
• The rule book seems to talk a lot about agreeing with your opponent on things…sort of an odd thing to emphasize.
• The structure of the book seems to be a bit poorly thought out, especially compared to the DW and FA 2.0 rulebooks. It is not the worst Spartan book I’ve seen, but it feels like a regression compared to those other games.

So, there you have it. Some of the members of the forum have manged to get a few games in, and their impressions are interesting. Basically, this looks like a fun game to me from reading the rules, and the models are excellent (as usual). However, this looks like another case of a set of half-baked rules from Spartan, which is disappointing.

Until next time!