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I must admit, I’ve had a difficult time deciding whether Gregor Hutton’s 3:16 Carnage Amongst the Stars is a quick and fun tactical board game seasoned cleverly with some role-playing game elements or a fairly light role-playing game with strong tactical board game elements.
Each time I’ve read over the game (and it is a fairly short read, at only 96 pages, with occasional original illustrations by the author to break up the well-set text) I’ve been struck by both its simplicity and its potential versatility. But more on that later. First, let me start with a basic summary.
You play a soldier. You kill aliens. You try to make it off-planet alive. This is not necessarily an easy task because not only are the various aliens trying to kill you but there’s a very real chance that one of your squadmates will bump you off with a stray grenade or a Planet Killer missile.
Yes, you read that correctly. It’s a missile. It kills the whole planet. That also includes you, since you’re on the planet that gets killed. That’s the bad news. The good news is that if your character brings down the thunder, he’s going to rack up a ludicrous amount of kills which leads to medals and promotions and all sorts of praise. It’ll all be posthumous, but that’s just fine. So long as they write an inspirational song about him and maybe name the next ship of the line after him, glory is the name of the game.
But that comes later. First comes life as a low-life maggot of a trooper, armed with naught but a rifle, a knife, and your MandelBrite Armor, guaranteed to protect you against one – that’s one – grievous injury per planet. Oh, and there are grenades, too.
My name is Gunnery Sergeant Hartman!
The system behind 3:16 is simplicity itself: roll a ten-sided die against your skill value. If your roll is lower than your skill number you succeed; if not, you don’t.
To make this simple system even more simple, you have only two skills: Fighting Ability (FA) and Non-Fighting Ability (NFA). Anything that involves combat goes under the first and everything else falls under the second. While this may seem incredibly generous, keep in mind that your character continues to be dropped into hot combat zones. Speed of game play is of the essence, as is speed of character generation. By limiting us to two skills, we are free to play the game instead of worrying about whether or not we have the right skill for the present task.
Character creation is similarly easy. Once you’ve gotten your skills and your starting number of kills, all you need is to establish your rank. That’s chosen by your skill ability and once you know that, the game supplies a template that covers what equipment you have, what special abilities the rank gives you, and the stats for your weapons (including how many potential kills each can produce).
Kills are important because they determine whether you get promoted or not. With promotions come an increase in skills and more firepower with which to dispatch the squamous alien menace.
Said menace is present in the form of “threat tokens”. Each token represents a number of aliens that isn’t fixed until the token is “killed”. That’s when the player who did the killing determines just how many killed they scored. Once the tokens for each encounter are gone, the fight is over. Each planet gets a finite number of tokens, which the GM apportions to each encounter until they are gone. There’s a special reward for being the solder that kills that last token as well, which just struck me as a little bit of extra fun thrown in for free. The game encourages maximum participation from all the players on every mission. There aren’t any missions where some soldiers get to mess around in the background while others do all the work. Everybody has something to do, even if it’s dying messily.
Though the threat token system seems simple, there’s a pleasing amount of complexity. Aliens can have special abilities, each of which costs a threat token. The example scenario in the book makes use of the Ambush special ability, which is sufficiently brutal to make players think twice about their tactics. And just as a side-note to any game designers, Velociraptors always make great monsters, at least for me. Intelligent, rapacious dinosaurs that can spit poison, shoot razor-sharp quills, or climb trees and work together like a veteran special forces team will always get a “OHMYGOD! SHOOT SHOOT!!” reflex out of me. I suspect I am not the only one here. So, more velociraptors, please.
The real treat in the threat token system is that the foes’ abilities will change for each planet and the GM had a wide range of latitude about what surprises to spring on the players and when to spring them. That variety should cure players of the “oh, great, another bug planet” blues and it gives 3:16 a lot of replay value. Clever GMs can find their own special abilities once they exhaust the list given in the book to spring even nastier surprises on the players as well.
The system rules are arranged very well, in a very sensible step-by-step fashion that leaves little to nothing to question. Every phase of the game is laid out in an easily-bulleted format with concise but understandable explanations for each point. This is a game you could easily pick up on the first read and play enjoyably as a “pick up game”.
However, that doesn’t mean that 3:16 is a pick up game. Thanks to a couple very clever wrinkles, 3:16 moves beyond a simple tabletop tactical exercise of kill or be digested into a satisfying roleplaying game.
Outstanding. Now all we need is a deck of cards
The first of these wrinkles is the use of Flashbacks. At any point in an encounter, you can call for a Flashback. Doing so immediately stops the encounter and hands the narrative over to the player who called the Flashback. What the player does with the narrative, now that they have it in their grubby little hands, depends on whether the flashback invoked a Weakness or Strength. One lets the player lose on their terms while the other lets them become the hero of the encounter and reap all the benefits thereof. Players don’t get a lot of Flashbacks, so they’re encouraged to use them at dramatically-appropriate moments, such as when the slavering beast’s ovipositor, ripe with embryonic horrors, is about to breach the character’s suddenly pink and squishy midsection, or when the ship’s mess runs out of cornbread. It’ll entirely depend on your players’ definitions of dramatically-appropriate.
The object of the Flashbacks is to let your players steer their character’s destiny without worrying about bad fortune undoing the drama. I like that a Flashback effectively stops time while the player spins their tale and finishes with a tangible effect on the encounter. As a player, it would encourage me to use them, but not to overuse them since I only have a very limited number of them over the life of the character.
The second roleplaying wrinkle shows up between missions. That’s the time when good (or merely lucky) soldiers are promoted or demoted, medals area awarded, and grudges developed toward kill-stealing glory hounds whose aim with a hand grenade is suspiciously lax when another soldier is about to cap the last alien on the planet. I see plenty of opportunities for roleplaying outside of combat as medals are pinned, new equipment is handed out, and stories are told about comrades long-eaten. There are also quick and easy rules for replacement characters in case the bug hunt turns out to be more bug and less hunt.
Once of the last things about the game that became readily apparent to me is that it need not be about space infantry and aliens locked in a universe of unending war. It could be about any two groups where one group outnumbers the other. For instance, you could “serious up” 3:16, change the weapon descriptions, and play British soldiers in the Zulu War (Roarke’s Drift anyone?) or Allied soldiers island-hopping across the Pacific during World War II. You could concoct a great plane-jumping fantasy game where players face off against a multidimensional threat that puts orcs and goblins on world after world. It would even work for a one-shot game where the PCs are among the 300 standing at the Hot Gates with minimal fuss.
That’s not to say that you have to, but it’s nice to know that you can.
Heading for Home
I’m going to recommend 3:16 Carnage Amongst the Stars highly. Gregor Hutton has put together a very nice little game that delivers a lot more complexity than it reveals on first, or even second, read. I realize that I’ve used the word “simple” quite a lot but there really isn’t a better word to describe it. 3:16 is a well-built machine that gets you into the action quickly and keeps you there until you’re ready to come up for breath. It works as a quick one-shot game and has the real potential to shine as the platform for a protracted campaign. The rules are easy to grasp and don’t have any major holes that I’ve been able to spot in my reading.
The price is right too. You can get it in PDF format for $10, the print version for $20 and a print/PDF bundle for $25, from various vendors.
In short, buy it. I think you’ll like it.
