We’d like to thank Modiphius for inviting Mike to a demo game of Hardwar at UKGE, and providing sample models for review.
Hardwar is an upcoming fast-paced tactical wargame from Modiphius, purchased from now-shuttered Polish company Strato Minis and expanded. Set in a realistic sci-fi universe at the turn of the 22nd century, Hardwar (a portmanteau of “Hardware Warfare”, referring to the unmanned remote drones that make up the majority of combat assets) uses an innovative dice resolution system and 6mm-scale miniatures, creating brutal combat between mech, vehicle, and air elements, mixing classic armored warfare with futuristic experimental weapons, cybernetics, ECM, and sentient combat swarms for strategic flexibility.
I met with the Modiphius team at UKGE, after Sophie reached out to see if we’d be interested in a demo of their upcoming small scale sci-fi skirmish game Hardwar. If you’d like to give the quickstart rules a try for yourself, you can find them via Kickstarter.
Playing the Game
Mike’s Thoughts on the Game
For the purposes of the demo Jamie had set us up on a 2×2 table with around 10 points per side. He took me through the unit cards, which are always nice to have in my experience. Not having to flip through a rulebook or an app makes things a lot smoother when all of the information is on the card, and you’re not looking at a huge deck. Four cards each was more than manageable, and while I don’t know if the keywords will be expanded upon on the other side of the card, it’d be great if they were. The cards can pull double duty between the quickstart rules and the full game, with those pips you can see representing profile degradation as a unit is damaged. For the quickstart, we’d just be using the bottom Total Damage stat.
Making attacks is a straight forward affair, with no weapon ranges to measure or think about. Instead, your target number is the distance of the shot with modifiers applied for intervening terrain, the target’s armour, and any keywords you might have. All of this comes together to keep the game moving at a good pace, and means that as the distances close things get very bloody. Critical hits are scored via assigning doubles to the target, so you really want to be pushing to roll lots of dice as close as possible, and hope that your opponent doesn’t roll matching numbers when calculating their defence.
The balance between heavier elements having huge firepower but a lower defence to represent the ease with which these behemoths of the battlefield can be targeted is a nice touch. Even heavy armour won’t save you if the enemy has all the time in the world to line up the perfect shot.
Smart use of terrain and movement becomes even more important when dealing with weapons that have an effectively infinite range, and the tension of making a longer move to try and set up a full power shot in a subsequent turn, versus making a short move and taking a pot shot made for some interesting choices during my demo. Jamie did a great job with keeping it all engaging, and even with the rules still being under active development at the time, we were never left stumbling over keywords or thumbing back and forth through the rulebook looking for how something was supposed to specifically function.
Rich’s Reaction to the Quickstart Rules
I really like that Modiphius specifically goes to efforts to acknowledge the existence of existing third party ranges of miniatures in the ruleset. They’re clear, obviously, that Hardwar is designed for their own range of 6mm miniatures, but confirm that it’s okay to use others, and guide you on how to deal with them potentially not being on bases, or being on different bases (the core guidance is “use whatever is appropriate to the miniature,” which is nice and permissive).
Onto the game itself. First up, this game uses D12s, the canonically most pleasant dice to hold in your hand and enjoy. A win so far. The core dice mechanic involves calculating a target number based on range, intervening cover, and target armour. A pool of dice is resolved, and the attacker can then sort them into separate pools – any pool that meets or exceeds the threshold deals a point of damage, and if that pool contains a double then the hit is critical and it deals a bonus damage.
Two extra mechanics add an interesting twist to this. The first is that the defence roll is simultaneous, with any results simply cancelling an attack dice showing the same number and reducing the pool. The second is the augment die – every uncancelled natural 12 on a die adds another roll to the pool, which can itself also explode and generate more augment dice.
I’m a big fan of how these systems work together. Want to make a super long range shot? Go for it, but that shell is probably going to glance off the target and only do one damage point due to needing to commit more dice to beat the target value. Short range, last ditch attacks could see huge damage spikes. And the augment dice can pop off at the perfect time to add that exhilarating moment of “I can’t believe that succeeded” that suffuses all wargaming. All of this is of course fleshed out with special rules, terrain rules, different actions to take during activations, etc.
The game feels very inspired by retro 90s/00s Real-Time Strategy (RTS) video games in the vein of Total Annihilation, Command & Conquer: Red Alert, and Supreme Commander, to name just a few. The art used in the Quickplay rules does nothing to disabuse this notion, with all of the usual photos of nicely painted miniatures featured alongside 3d-rendered scenes that wouldn’t look out of place in an RTS cinematic.
The Models
There’s a reasonable amount of variety in the range for the setting, with forces primarily being composed of tanks that can bring along some walkers or flyers for support and extra firepower. The silhouettes for the walkers offer a reasonable amount of distinction, and the tanks have clear battlefield roles based on their armament and size. The farm-based and industrial terrain takes some obvious queues from media like Love, Death & Robots, and it offers a refreshing change of battlefield from the usual apocalyptic futures.
The resin casts all had crisp and well defined details, with what felt like the right amount of greebles and extra details for the scale. Little things like optics, reactive armour panels, and shaped sections allow you to add some additional visual interest and variation if the mood strikes you. Unfortunately, a couple of the gates on the tank bodies had obscured details. I needed to spend time sculpting it back in, and cleaning up the additional resin on what were otherwise great pieces.
While Modiphius use a powder based release agent for their casts, which tends to be better for fighting paint adhesion issues, I’ve still found that Molotow One4All through an airbrush will occasionally not take properly to the resin. This time around, I gave everything a very good clean with warm soapy water in an ultrasonic cleaner, followed by a scrub with toothbrush and this seems to have done the trick. I didn’t have any paint sloughing away under pressure from the brush, and I could comfortably apply an oil wash and then remove it from the highest points with a cotton bud.
Final Thoughts
Mike: With a set of unique terrain, some interesting sculpts, and rules that are very quick to pick up and play, Hardwar quickplay is looking like a great choice for those searching for a lightweight sci-fi skirmish game. I’m looking forward to getting my hands on some more stompy robots, and I’ll be backing the Kickstarter once it’s available.
Rich: I am also definitely planning on backing the Kickstarter campaign when it goes live. I’ve been thinking of dipping my toe into a small-scale sci-fi project for quite a while, and the dice mechanic for Hardwar strikes me as the kind of simple-but-exciting system that is easy to show to other people and get them hooked! That farm terrain is absolutely catching my eye, too. Modiphius is promising quite a wide range of sculpts for the game, with several different factions present, so if neither of the first two that have been shown catch your eye then there may be something more suited to your tastes in the upcoming pipeline.
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