3: 16 Carnage Among the Stars
I’m not sure where I first heard of this game. Either it was on the NZRag boards or perhaps Story Games. Where ever it was the premise grabbed me immediately.
If you don’t know what I’m talking about this is a game about Space Marines. Space Marines who are members of Terra’s Expeditionary Force, the 16th Brigade of the 3rd Army to be precise. An army whose main directive is to go into the stars, find life and kill it. However the subtleties and possibilities open to a gamer with a bit of imagination and willingness to do things differently is huge.
While I haven’t been able to play this game properly yet (I’m planning a Skype game, but more on that later) I have read the pdf from cover to cover and love what I’ve read.
It is a game about conflict. Players vs bugs, players vs shitty COs, players vs each other and the mechanic that drives all this is simple, effective and devastating. Unlike many games in which combat is one of the main elements 3: 16 doesn’t want to know how much damage you do to one enemy. Oh no, if you hit (using the oh so well named FA or Fighting Ability) you roll to see how many enemies you kill. Not just one, but many. It’s almost as if the designer of this game, Gregor Hutton (http://boxninja.com), thought that just one person to kill wasn’t quite ambitious enough.
As I’m talking about the use of FA I might as well touch on the lightening fast character creation. You choose a name, a characteristic and split 10 points between FA and NFA, or Non-fighting Ability. If you try to kill things, then it’s FA for everything else there’s NFA (to rip of a well known credit card company). That’s it, you’re done! Now it’s time for the GM to randomly roll for the planet and it’s aliens and you’re done.
There are more rules around levelling and gaining rank, as well as different weapons and gadgets that you can eventually get as well. All this is standard and I might even say necessary fare for a sci-fi game. But the thing I like most about it is that if you never want your Trooper to walk the halls of officer-hood then you can still be damn kick-arse! If you want to try your hand at choosing the planets and the missions as a Captain or even the terrifying Brigadier then you can do that as well.
While it seems at first glance like this game is just about killing aliens it actually appears to have the scope for a far richer experience, if of course you think there needs to be more than just shooting bugs.