Firefight Second Edition Public Playtest

There are exciting times ahead for fans of sci-fi skirmish games because we're preparing a new edition of Firefight and, even better, you get to help us playtest it! We want Firefight Second Edition to be fast-paced, furious and, most importantly of all, fun!

Over the past year Andy "Dr. Deadzone" Sharp has been developing Firefight in his top secret laboratory and it's now go to the point where we're ready for the public to start playing... and probably break it.

The main concept behind Firefight Second Edition is that we wanted a game that scaled up from Deadzone, rather than scaled down from Warpath. In fact, Firefight Second Edition started as Deadzone XL, which Andy playtested at the Mantic Open Day a few years ago.

As a result, the new Firefight will share some rules in common with Deadzone and even uses D8s - so you don't have to buy new dice, while the Command Dice have been replaced with Vanguard-style Power Dice (Command Points) to give some variation in special orders.

The other key concept was to make sure that Firefight played almost as quickly as Deadzone. Part of the beauty of Deadzone is that there is no measuring and, instead, you just move from cube to cube. Although Firefight doesn't have cubes, it makes all the measuring much easier by taking LoS and movement from the squad leaders - so you basically only have to measure one and then move/shoot. This ensures it plays fast and furious... just like Andy himself.

Another element was to make the game fairly small. A typical game is 1,000pts, which can easily be played on a 4x4 gaming table, which also helps to get you into the thick of the action nice and quick. However, the great thing is the rules are flexible enough to scale down to 3x3 and scale up to 6x4.

HOW TO PLAY

So, how can you get involved? Well, firstly make sure you download the playtest rules below. Please bear in mind these are totally work in progress so things are likely to change over the following months. You may also notice that not all the current Firefight factions are included in the rules. Don't worry! These will be added in the future but, for now, we wanted to concentrate on just four factions so we can make sure they're balanced before moving on.

You might also need some miniatures too! Well, we're pleased to say that for the rest of April you can use the code FIREFIGHTPLAYTEST to get 20% off any Warpath Mega Force, Warpath Starter Force or Warpath Reserve Force. The latter, in particular, is a great way to upgrade your Deadzone strike team. One thing to note, the Warpath sets won't start shipping until April 26th because we need to build them!

Once you've downloaded the rules and played a few games, you can give your feedback on the Facebook group here.