Tactical Assault Games

Creative Ideas

ROLE PLAYING AID

It has been brought to our attention that both the Combat Cards & the Fantasy Cards can serve as useful aids in running role-playing campaigns - especially to resolve combats that do not directly involve the player characters, but may still have an important bearing on the campaign.

Who hasn't played in a role playing campaign where the heroes set out on a mission or quest along with a company of the king's guard or a platoon of colonial marines escorting them?

The extra troops are not there do the heroes' work for them, but rather to support the heroes in some important role - such as keeping the escape route open from marauding orcs while the heroes explore, or by holding the alien monstrosities at bay while the heroes search a wreck site.

Unfortunately, playing out a side battle that doesn't involve the heroes, at the level of detail that most role playing games do, may prove impractical and tedious - and result in too much precious game time being taken away from the action involving the characters.

Yet the success of these troops and their mission is important to the story line and will eventually affect the heroes, so some attention should be given to their struggle and its outcome.

That is where the Combat Cards & Fantasy Cards can really be a life saver. With the simplicity of generic unit types, the speed of play, and the ease of teaching the rules to newbies, they can be an efficient and effective way to resolve those important side battles - without taking too much time away from the main adventure.

The narrative nature of the Cards also allow game masters flexibility in determining how important aspect of the battle will mesh with the role playing action as well with the role playing system being used.

(Some examples being: How many rounds went by before that alien nasty broke through the marines' lines and went for the heroes? Has an Eliminated unit truly lost all of its "damage points" or is just unconscious and clinging to life?).

Combine the core games with the appropriate expansion sets, and the feel and flavor of just about any role playing system can be emulated on the Combat Cards or Fantasy Cards battlefield.

So the next time your heroes are about to set out with an escort in tow, give some thought to how the Combat Cards or the Fantasy Cards just might prove to be a real help to you the beleaguered game master...

Welcome To Tactical Assault Games

Welcome to our new website! Take a look around and see what’s here, then take some time to dive into our games a little deeper to see what they are all about. Hopefully with all of the information available on the site you will have a better idea what we as a company are hoping to do, and just how fun our games can be!

Again though, welcome…

* * Recent Articles * *

Update…

December 4, 2012

We just realized it has been a while since we have had an update here on the site. Rest assured, a lack news is not for a lack of anything going on – we have just been so busy it slipped under the radar.

Here are some of the things we have been working on:

New Tech Card Set Coming
We are working to put the finishing touches on the next expansion for the Technology Cards. This time it will be chock full of sci-fi technologies to add to your Combat Card battles.

Print-On-Demand Commercially Printed Versions
We are also working on adjusting the formatting of the Combat and Fantasy Cards to allow for them to be printed as a finished deck by a commercial printer on a Print-On-Demand basis. While we have not yet seen the proofs, we have been assured that the cards that folks will get will be really top notch – thick glossy card stock, rounded corners, etc. We are hoping to have more information on the availability of these in the new year.

Solo Cards Progress
Work continues on the solo versions of the Combat and Fantasy Cards. The basic mechanics are pretty much done, we are now just working the kinks out of the scenario structure. So far they accomplish everything we had hoped for – they perform just like a regular game for the player, are easy to set-up and run and are useable for any genre normally covered by the games. In addition, the test battles have proven to be very fun & unpredictable and will really lend themselves to extended campaigns.

So there is a little taste of what we are working on around here. Hopefully, it won’t be quite so long before the next update… 😉

Category: General...

Designer Q&A…

October 22, 2012

In this installment a couple of questions about deploying forces in the Combat Cards are discussed…

When my friend and I play a game, we usually just deploy our forces along our table edges and set out some objectives in the middle of the table. Unfortunately our battles always seem to end in a stalemate, with neither of us able to get to any of the objectives – we instead just sit and shoot at each other. Are we doing something wrong?

You really aren’t doing anything wrong; it is just that the rules are just working the way they are supposed to. As can be seen in numerous historical examples, moving in the face of a concentrated enemy force is usually going to prove costly and fruitless.

Whenever folks deploy along an edge of a battlefield they are in effect setting up “gun-lines”, a powerful formation created when a mixture of long and short range weapons interweave their fields of fire to make movement on the battlefield almost impossible. [Read more…]

Category: Designer Q&A...

Information…

October 5, 2012

Just a quick hit to let folks who didn’t realize it know that there is a new Idea of the Week up. this time is talks about cheat sheets for the various expansion sets. Enjoy!