One of the questions about Dust Tactics that I encounter most often is, understandably, an important one to most of the wargamers I know. While many folks have read by now that it’s a board game, what exactly does that mean? Is it a highly stylized “board game” with a wargame-like theme layered on top along with some nice plastic bits, or is it a wargame squeezed into a board game format?

My two cents is that it sits pretty firmly in the latter category. It’s a wargame that takes advantage of many of the conventions of the board game genre to regularize play and create appeal for a cross-over audience that otherwise might toss it off as just another tabletop figure-pusher.

The square-gridded gaming surface does indeed stylize play, but no more so than a hexgrid stylizes play in games like Memoir 44 and Tide of Iron — or ASL, for that matter. Important details like weapon ranges may seem contrived and “board game-y” to tabletop purists, but when you compare the interaction between weapons and movement in Dust Tactics to the same dimensions in popular game systems like Warhammer 40k, the numbers aren’t out of line at all. And has anybody noticed that the 4-hex range of the basic Soviet rifle squad in ASL is exactly equal to an infantry squad’s unaugmented one-turn movement allowance of 4? In Dust Tactics, “standard” rifle fire has a 4-square range and the average squad of grunts can move a maximum of 2 squares in a turn. Continue reading →

So far in my explorations of Dust Tactics, I’ve written at length about just one element of the force a player has at his disposal — his grunts. But the infantry units in the game, whether protected by heavy armor or not, aren’t the whole focus of the game. To play well consistently, and to get the most enjoyment out of the game, you also need to work the game system’s vehicles and individual heroes into your battle plans.

Reflecting a World War II era style of classification, both sides have light, medium and heavy combat walkers. A single “chassis” is available for each class, but they feature a number of different customizable weapon fits. The Allied medium walker box set, for example, ships with four different configurations: a 17-pounder tank-killing long gun; a short 75mm howitzer; a wicked short-ranged napalm thrower and a nasty artillery version with a rack of bombardment rockets and a “petard” mortar. The weapons easily interchange by snapping on and off the walker’s turret. Continue reading →

After a few games of Dust Tactics, I think it’s safe to say that I’m pretty happy with the results. But that statement bears a word of caution to my fellow minis enthusiasts out there: Dust Tactics is not a tabletop miniatures game. As I noted at the end of my last post, it is first and foremost a boardgame. As a standard of comparison, it has more in common with a game like Memoir 44 than a tabletop game like Command Decision, or even Warhammer 40k. The very nice mini figures aside, it is not in any way an attempt at alt-history simulation. But it is a lot of fun.

Don’t get me wrong, though. Dust Tactics has plenty in common with many tabletop rules sets; it’s much more than a military “themed” boardgame. Sound wargaming tactics will win games more often than not, but there are elements of stylized boardgame play that you have to account for in order to succeed consistently. “Classic” fire-and-maneuver play, for example, is certainly viable in the game, but it depends on what the terrain allows and your style of play. Continue reading →

A significant amount of time has passed since the last time I wrote about my Particular Addiction. Much as Sherlock Holmes had trouble resisting the siren call of his seven percent solution, I occasionally fall victim to the allure of “plastic crack,” known to the wider world as wargaming miniatures.

Like many other, more serious, forms of addiction, the urge to fiddle around with plastic crack can go into remission for long periods of time, but the addict is never truly free of it. Sometimes a glimpse of some new product can trigger a collapse; at other times, the irresistible urge seems to manifest for no particular reason. And sometimes I simply cave in after a lengthy struggle against the gnawing idea that something new looks like a lot of fun.

It’s that last one, this time. “Dust Tactics” isn’t exactly new, but it has now officially arrived here in the Swamp Bunker. “Arrived” with a big thump, more specifically, because I recently snagged a good deal on one of the game’s “old style” core box sets, which ships in one of Fantasy Flight’s giant-sized game boxes. Continue reading →