--- title: "Black Ops game review" subtitle: "Game book review" author: Seth publish_date: 2025-02-08 08:00 hero_classes: text-light title-h1h2 overlay-dark-gradient hero-large parallax hero_image: miniature-battle-1600x800.webp show_sidebar: true show_breadcrumbs: true show_pagination: true taxonomy: category: blog tag: [ gaming, tools, wargame ] --- I picked up the **Black Ops** wargame, written by Guy Bowers and published by Osprey Games, and have had a great time playing it. This is my review of it as a book and as a game system. The **Black Ops** book is in the ubiquitous blue book series by Osprey, so it's the usual 64 pages sprinkled with text, tables, and images. The familiar look and feel of these books, as I've come to learn recently, doesn't necessarily mean the game system is presented in a way that's easy to comprehend and retain, but luckily **Black Ops** is beautifully logical and intuitive. I'll admit I don't love all the section headings (I really wish every wargame and RPG would just use obvious headings that state exactly what action is being described: Attack, Move, Save, and so on), but as long as you read the text once or twice you get familiar with where all the vital information is. In short, I had no trouble navigating this book, and I quickly memorized where all the important tables and paragraphs were as I played my first few games. The game has two goals. First, it aims to emulate action movies I've never even heard of and video games I've never played. Secondly, it attempts to be a game of stealth ("tactical espionage"). The latter intrigued me and was the main reason (aside from the author's credentials) bought the book. The former seemed promising, because basing a game off a movie doesn't exactly make me think of waiting a quarter of an hour for your opponent to get through a turn so you can play. I like a fast wargame, so I was hoping for a system that gets out of your way. And that is _exactly_ what this game system provides. **Black Ops** features fast-paced and tense action with just enough options to add variety to the game but never so much that your game slows down. ## Activation I love the activation system in **Black Ops**. Like **Blacktstone Fortress** and **Cursed City**, activation is determined with a deck of cards. Because **Black Ops** is just a book, and doesn't know what miniatures you're using, it can't provide cards specific to your gaming table. Instead, it suggests using a poker deck, with different classifications of characters (Leader, Heavy, Specialist, and so on) assigned to different card types (King, Queen, Jack, and so on). I'm using those useless Bunker scoring cards from White Dwarf, with some scribbled symbols on. It's an easy method of determining activation, it defines a game round easily (when you run out of cards, start a new round), and it adds randomness to initiative. Having experienced this method now in **Blackstone Fortress** and **Cursed City** and now in **Black Ops**, I'm not sure I want to go back to any other method. Assigning abstract cards to specific miniatures can be a little bothersome, but aside from that it's really a perfect activation system. ## Game mechanics What mechanics? You just play the game. As long as you've played a wargame or two, the basic mechanics feel so natural that you almost fall into it. Here it is: you roll a d6 and hope to match or exceed the corresponding attribute on your character's stats. That's it. For example, a ranged attack uses the ACC (Accuracy) attribute. If your miniature has ACC 5, then you need to roll a 5 or 6 to suceed. There may be modifiers on your ACC rating, though. For example, if you've moved 6 inches prior to shooting, then you must add 1 to your target ACC (you must roll 6 to succeed). On the other hand, if you don't move and choose to take the Aim action instead, you subtract 1 from your ACC (you must roll 4 to succeed). Modifiers can add up depending on distance, cover, and awareness, so sometimes taking a shot is a very good choice and other times it's just a way to make a lot of noise and alert your enemies to your presence. It takes just a few practice rounds to learn the Move and Attack sequence, and it ends up being marvelously fluid. You can go through several turns where that's the game play: move, shoot, move, shoot, move, shoot. It's so satisfyingly simple. It doesn't have to be that simple all the time, though. **Black Ops** is designed to enable stealth, so there's are robust mechanics around line-of-sight, hiding, and awareness. When you play a stealth mission, the direction your miniatures are facing is vitally significant, and every rotation of a miniature matters. ## Melee Close Quarters Combat (CQC) is the melee system in the game, and it's even faster and simpler than ranged combat. It's basically a roll off, with a truth table determining the effects. The one thing I dislike about melee in **Black Ops** is that you're basically locked in melee unless you're able to make a successful CQC test to disengage. Your game starts to feel less cool when all miniatures on the table get locked in a pairs and start ineffectually slapping each other to death. I prefer it when a game system allows for interesting choices, so in my games I add the option to take an Opportunity Attack when its opponent disengages without succeeding at a CQC test. Problem solved. ## Health There's no HP or Wounds counter in **Black Ops**, which can be both a good and a "bad" feature. The good thing about it is that you never have to count Wounds. When a miniature is hit by an attack, it either fails its save and dies, or it succeeds and lives. That's it. Life or death. A simple toggle, requiring no persistent memory. What a relief. On the other hand, I find the lack of Wounds actually a little deflating. The tension of knowing that a miniature only has 1 more Wound left actually adds a lot to my games, and I miss it in **Black Ops**. With **Black Ops**, it's literally a roll of the die whether a hit removes a miniature from play or not. There's tension there, but somehow it's a different kind of tension. It feels like it's down to chance, beyond my control. When I have a Wound counter, though, I feel like I can make different choices for a miniature based on whether it's at full health or half health. It's not bothersome enough for me to change how I play **Black Ops**, which must mean something. I think there's a verisimilitude to the fatalistic save-or-die mechanic that maybe, deep down, I actually like. That said, I wouldn't switch to it in my other games. ## RNA (Ridiculous Number of Acronyms) The OLA (One Legitimate Annoyance) of BO (Black Ops) is its NoA (Number of Acronyms). There are acronyms everywhere. Fancy a GPMG? What about an LSW? Or would you rather a GL? Personally I take HE weapons, but you might take a more direct approach using a DMR RPG. (To this day, I don't know what HE means. It's a weapon trait. I know what it does, but I can't divine even from the trait description what HE stands for.) I'm used to a stat block having abbreviations or acronyms, so CQC (Close Quarters Combat) is fair game, even though it strikes me as an over-complex way of just saying "melee". But firearms and some weapon traits and literally all but 3 heavy weapons in this book get listed by acronym. Sometimes an acronym is explained, and sometimes they aren't. Even when they are explained, I find it DTI (Difficult To Internalize) what they mean while CRT (Cross-Referencing Tables) for WT (Weapon Traits), so then I end up STB (Searching The Book) for that OP (One Paragraph) where a particular weapon is casually and decrypted in passing. It's basically impossible, especially in the HOG (Heat Of Game). There's a simple work-around to this, which you're probably going to do anyway, and that's to take careful notes about your weapons while building your army. The over-use of acronyms pains me, but then again I work in tech where TLA (Three-Letter Acronyms) are an epidemic, so maybe I'm over-sensitive. But I do value clarity in documentation, and the acronyms in **Black Ops** does make me a little sad and, more importantly, a little bit of a MCG (Mildly Confounded Gamer) or maybe even a VCG (Very Confused Gamer). ## Character building There are 11 pages of sample squads, and 3 pages for building your own custom squad. I've yet to bother building my own because the sample ones feel good enough for me. Between weapon and armour options, I feel like my miniatures feel sufficiently customized. The build process is pretty simple, though. You look through a few pages of build options in tables, spend a budget of points agreed upon by you and your opponent, and you end up with stats. Not a problem, really. Weapons can add to or subtract from your effective stats, but not all weapon effects make sense for your kill team. For instance, Blunt and Shock weapons are strong against unarmoured targets, but most of my games are played with armoured soldiers. It doesn't make sense for those weapon effects to be options in my games, but the fix is simple. I declare that the Blunt and Shock effects are valid for armoured opponents, so my great big electrified warhammers and maces are suddenly useful. Problem solved. ## Truly great skirmisher I think I'd enjoy **Black Ops** even if it were based around the d8 or d10, but I do find d6 systems extremely comforting, whether it's **Shadowrun** or **Warhammer** or **Middle-earth Strategy Battle Game** or **Black Ops**. There's just something about the simplicity of those classic dice and the immediacy of knowing exactly what those 6 numbers mean. That's reflective of the game itself. The rules are simple for an experienced wargamer, and probably manageable for a new wargamer. The game loop is summarized in just a 7-point bullet list, and the activation system adds excitement and variety to each round. It deftly provide satisfying game play for either run-and-gun tactics or stealth, or a mix of the two. As a general-purpose wargame, this is humbly one of the best I've played.

Header photo Creative Commons cc0.