Episode: 3869
Title: HPR3869: 5 minute war game
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3869/hpr3869.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 06:57:14

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3869 for Thursday 1 June 2023.
Today's show is entitled 5 Minute War Game.
It is part of the series' tabletop gaming.
It is hosted by Klaatu and is about 14 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is I made up a game so I could play with my painted toy soldiers while waiting
for code to compile.
Hey everybody, this is Klaatu and I'm going to share a little game with you this episode
because as I've said before, fairly recently on Hacker Public Radio, I've been painting
miniatures, plastic miniatures, like the ones that you use.
You see people using in D&D games on TV shows when you see D&D being played or maybe
you play yourself.
You've seen little miniatures, there are little plastic toy soldiers, sometimes they're
fantasy themed, sometimes they're sort of historically militaristic themed, sometimes
their future sci-fi militaristic themed, there are little plastic miniatures and you
paint them and it's a lot of fun and the end result is that you have a bunch of toy soldiers
sitting around on desks and shelves and you love to look at them, I do, I love looking
at these things, sometimes I don't because I didn't paint them well and then I get sad,
but a lot of times I do, I enjoy looking at them because I think maybe I did do a good
job at painting that particular one or maybe it's at least passable, but you like to
sort of look at these things because you've spent time on them and on a good day, like
if you've bought the right miniature, then they're really, really beautifully sculpted,
that's kind of cool, like some artist somewhere has been laboring over creating this little
figure, so there are a lot of fun to look at, then I like to kind of idly have them
out on my desk while I'm at work or something and I'll glance down at them and sometimes
take between projects or something, I'll kind of pick them up and look at them and if
you hold them kind of close to your face then they look really big and so you can kind
of pretend that they're really huge in the frame, like in a movie or something and you
can kind of move them around and kind of visualize the battlefield around them or maybe
they're on a spaceship or their explosions around or whatever, it's fun and I was doing
that a while ago and I thought there's got to be a way to capture the sort of glee that
you get when you're just admiring the miniature and visualizing them in whatever imagined setting
or scene you have in mind in your imagination and the fun of their intended purpose I think
which is games and I do play a couple of different war games with miniatures and I play
in some tabletop RPG and use miniatures so they do get used for their intended purpose
but those games like whether it's tabletop RPG or like a war game or pandemic reign of
Cthulhu which has little miniatures those things are events you know like you have to set
them up you have to get a table you have to put out the game board or the play area you
have to shuffle cards or set up terrain get some die and and it it takes what 45 minutes
an hour two hours you know like however long that sort of scenario takes you it's a it's
a big deal and and sometimes you just don't have that time or sometimes you do but it's
not until seven o'clock in the evening and right now it's 10 a.m. and you think instead
of just looking at these miniatures I'd like to play with the miniatures so I came
up with what I call scuffle lamer it is a desktop like a literal desktop like on your desk
at work it's a desktop war game that takes about five minutes at the longest to play there
are also versions of it that can take three minutes or one minutes one minute here's how
to play what you need you need a couple of war game miniatures and that those can be games
workshops miniatures a just sigma or they could be things that you've 3d printed you Lego mini
figs whatever you have on your desk that you like to look at and you want to play with use
those you need two to three six sided dice per miniature so for each miniature you are you're
using you need to or through well one two or three six sided dice per per miniature and then you
need a 20 by 20 centimeter play area if you don't know what 20 centimeters is just look at your
hand it's probably from your wrist to your fingertips that's probably about 20 centimeters it
doesn't have to be precise this is very flexible system okay so that's that's what you need miniatures
dice and a small little corner of a of a surface okay so here's the setup you place your miniatures
let's just assume you're using four miniatures for right now you place your miniatures on your
in your play area in any configuration that you want you also decide during this step how those
miniatures relate to one another so for instance I have some blue space marines and some aliens so
I'm gonna just say that the aliens are on one team and the space marines are on another team I
could also say that they're all on their own team like they're each individual agents with no
relationship to one another at all they've all converged in an area and realized that they have
to fight each other it it's up to you but I'm just gonna say to keep things a little bit organized
I'll say that the alien is team A and the space marines are team B okay next for a long game
place 3d6 by each miniature for a short game so a long game is about five minutes a short game is
three minutes and a tiny game is one minute so for a long game you need 3d6 just set it set next to
each miniature for a short game go for 2d6 and for a really lightening fast game go for 1d6 finally
decide which miniature is gonna go first you can either roll a die and like assign a number for
you I don't do that I just I just say the one closest to me goes first and then I go sort of
team by team so if if the one closest to me is a space marine then okay space marines go first
and then then the aliens if it way if it happened to to be an alien then the aliens would go first
it really doesn't matter okay so the the the the turn order the game itself is played very simply
you've got two types of actions that you can take on your turn you can move or attack you cannot
do both in one turn so you either have to move or attack to move a miniature can move literally
anywhere in the play area they can move up to another miniature entering the melee zone or they
could move for instance behind an object let's say I happen to have a USB thumb drive sitting here
on my desk well maybe it moves up to that thumb drive and and and uses it as cover or here's my
coffee cup and it's got a lid on it so maybe maybe this space marine moves up onto my coffee cup
to get like a higher higher vantage point you can grant modifiers as you see fit so for instance
if it is hiding behind this USB thumb drive well maybe that's going to grant this miniature a or
it rather impose a minus one to attacks against this miniature because it's got cover
and or maybe if if another miniature jumps up onto my coffee cup maybe it'll get a plus one to
its attacks because it has a pretty good elevated vantage point so that's movement and each
miniature can do that on its you know can can do that on its turn and then and then the turn ends
if it does move up to a coffee cup or behind the thumb drive or whatever just be sure to bring
its de-sixes along with it the other option is to attack so on your on a miniature's turn it can
also just attack another miniature that's why knowing whether they're on teams or whether they're
all every every miniature for itself you kind of need to know that so in this case they're on teams
so one of my space marines has just moved behind a thumb drive so that's that's its turn
but the other space marine hasn't gone yet so maybe it'll go and it'll attack one of the aliens
to make an attack you take a de-six from that miniature's dice pool permanently it's using up one
of its dice and you roll it when it's a ranged attack so like a gun or a crossbow or a magical spell
from afar you hit your target if you roll a four five or six it's pretty good chances that's
like a 50-50 chance of hitting your target in this case it actually did hit its target it rolled
the six so it's target I'm going to take one of the targets de-sixes and put it out of the game
so it is down to 2d6 now even though it hasn't even gotten to attack yet it only has 2d6
in its dice pool in other cases if for instance this alien that just got hit happens to be holding
a sword it can well it can't actually but it okay so it can move up to this other miniatures
to the other miniature entering the melee zone it can't attack yet because it can only move or
attack on its turn but once it is able to attack because it is in melee it would hit on a roll of
three four five or six so in other words ranged attacks hit on four five or six melee hits on
three four five or six as I say there are there could be potentially modifiers that either help
it or hinder it from making it's from from from meeting its target but but on the die four five
six for ranged three four five six for melee all damage is a penalty of one of one dice from your
dice pool so anytime you get hit here's so here's the other alien it's gonna target the space marine
hiding behind that thumb drive so I'm gonna take one of its dice from its pool roll it oh and it
rolled a six as well so even with a penalty of a negative one because of the usb thumb drive cover
uh that's a hit against that space marine so I take one die from the space marines dice pool
and put it to the side so we're down to basically everyone having two dice in their pool
whether or not they've actually made an attack play continues in that manner you can move you can
attack when you take damage you lose dice now eventually you're gonna get a miniatures gonna
get down to zero dice in its pool here's how to handle that if you use up your last die
with an attack you're fine you just can't attack anymore you're done you're out of ammo or whatever
and frankly the game is probably going to end in a minute now if you take damage and you have no
dice in your dice pool though you're dead if you take damage and that damage removes your last
die then you're dead the last miniature or miniatures left standing after everyone else after all
dice has been removed from the play area those are the winners in other words if you're not dead at
the end then you've won and sometimes that is more than one miniature sometimes it's it's a team
of miniatures sometimes it's two members of an opposing team and maybe you want to come back later
after lunch or something and and have them do a a showdown who knows so this is obviously a really
simple and really really quick game you can play lots of of of little scenarios like this a lot of
little they're not even skirmishes there really are just scuffles can play them within you know five
or three or literally one minute it's super fast it's it's not it it's almost not playing a game
I mean it's almost just rolling die but because there's the presence of these miniatures and
because you're moving it around your desk and maybe you are maybe you have brought in random
objects that are lying around on your desk I mean I've got like a mobile phone I've got a little
tiny little USB hub got a USB thumb drive I've got a glasses case like all of these things can
become like part of the of the battlefield and it makes for a really fun and quick and silly
little war game just while you're waiting for something to compile that's the game I call it scuffle
whammer it is available online at itch.io for download or I mean you can literally just play
it based off of what I just said there you don't really need a download like the rules are pretty
simple right you can move or attack a ranged attack hits on four five or six a melee attack
hits on three four five or six damaged removes one die and attack removes one die that's it
those are the rules it's a lot of fun try it thanks for listening
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