Clay-Kickers: Tunnel Warfare on the Western Front.

[TheWanderer]

Ypres, 1917. A great battle rages overhead, the like of which the world has never seen before. An unceasing exchange of industrial firepower, grinding men into ash and dust. Beneath the earth, a different kind of struggle is waged. Men cram themselves into lightless burrows, undermining the great earthworks above with great quantities of explosives.

This is the story of that struggle.

Clay-Kickers is an objective based skirmish wargame for two players. Each player controls a squad of engineers, demolition experts and battle-hardened close-quarter fighters.

With their motley crew of tunnel rats, the players will create their own tunnels under the battlefields of the Western Front, avoiding underground hazards and engaging the enemy in brutal close-range brawls.

http://www.mediafire.com/download/o2x793qr3uxz779/Clay-Kickers.pdf Playtest copy available at that link. Rudimentary templates for marking out tunnels available here.

[fred]

Downloading now.

A very interesting idea, I've long been interested in the mining war.  I'm interested to see how you have approached this where so much of what the opponent is doing is unknown.

[fred]

Unfortunately the download doesn't work for me, I'm afraid.  I can get the tunnel sections image file, but not the PDF

[Rich H]

Looks interesting:D

[S_P]

Great stuff- thanks for posting.

[Gun bunny]

  naaaasty fight idea, i look forward to reading it...thank you 

[fred]

Managed to download ok on my iPad.  Will have a proper look later

[fred]

Managed to have a read through these.

One thing I'm not sure about is the objectives - can both players see these, so they know where the enemy is trying to get to? I'm not really sure how this game replicates the difficult of knowing where the enemy was digging - so the need for defensive tunnels and listening posts.

If both players are laying out their tunnels on the table, you know where the enemy is. I realise that you can't directly react to this as you can only go towards objectives or noise markers.

I might well be missing something. But it does seem hard to replicate the unknown on a table top game. It kind of feels that a tunnelling war wargame almost needs to be a computer game (or umpire driven) to keep the uncertainty very high. 

[TheWanderer]

It's worth thinking about. Might try giving each side a set of objective markers, so both players are working towards different goals.

[fred]

Yes - would help. With give tension as you know the enemy is coming, but until you hear them there is nothing you can do. The game would turn in to a bit of a race - which it often was, with one side trying to get under the enemy trenches to blow a mine before this was done to them.

Another thought I had was to have blinds for tunnels, so for every real tunnel you dig, you can lay 1 or 2 fake tunnels. But I'm not sure how you would mark the real vs the fake ones.

[TheWanderer]

http://www.megafileupload.com/jO9s/Clay-Kickers_0.1.pdf

Updated with a couple of new gear items and re-worked objective markers.

[Kommando_J]

I saw this on the /hwg/ on 4chan, glad to see it's still going.