Review: Xenos Rampant

I finally managed to play a game of Xenos Rampant—two games in fact, it proved to be quick and easy to play. Xenos Rampant is written by Daniel Mersey and Richard Cowen, a wargame that takes Mersey’s Lion Rampant and brings it into the world of science fiction.

Xenos Rampant is a minis agnostic platoon sized game. A ‘standard’ game will probably be 4-6 units, but there is a lot of latitude. You will build your units from some core archetypes and a lot of customization. You can make fairly flavourful approximations of the sorts of units you would field in 40K. Units are typically 5 strength points, with each strength point typically referring to a single model in the unit. But the game lets you model things in a mix of ways, so a 5 strength point unit might be 5 Sisters of Battle, or a single Canoness who would track her strength points with a dice. One issue to me was that it’s easy for everything to feel a bit too similar. I ran Sisters of Battle and Evan, my wargaming compatriot, ran his weird kit-bashed AdMech / Imperial Guard minis. I built my Sisters Repentia, the chainsword wielding maniacs of the Sisters of Battle, as Berserk Infantry, with High Powered Blades, Unarmed (no guns), and *Fanatical Discipline as customizations of that unit type. There are lots of 40K units that might also be modelled exactly like this, even if you’d like them to feel more distinct. I imagine this game would work nicely as an alternative ruleset to the Horus Heresy, with Space Marines fighting Space Marines.

The game is very easy to play. Players take turns moving all their units, with a catch: you roll to activate units, and keep activating units till you fail or have activated them all. When that happens your opponent till take their turn, going through the same process. (This is similar to one of the greatest games ever, A Song of Blades and Heroes.) There are three actions a unit can take: Move, Shoot, or Attack (move into combat). In Xenos Rampant each unit has one action they can do without having to roll. After playing 2 games of Xenos Rampant I’m not sure I like the rule, the extra reliability felt overly impactful in our admittedly small sample size of games.

There is only one dice roll to resolve combat, whether you are shooting or fighting up close. You roll 10d6 if you’re at full strength, 5d6 if you’re less than half, and need to beat a target number. You need a number of successes equal the opposing units armour score to remove a strength point. There is no additional rolling or faffing about. A simple example: rolling 10 dice and getting 7 successes into a unit with 3 armour would remove 2 models (if that’s how you’re tracking strength points), the last success having no effect. Like Warcry and other games with simple resolution systems, this makes the game play super quick.

We didn’t dig into all the extra rules and advice for running the game in various settings. They have sample rules and advice for running games like Weird World War, Star Trek, etc. Between these extra rules and all the other customization, it really does feel like you could express any game or setting you wanted within this generic ruleset.

If I have one criticism it’s that the rules writing and organization of the rule book isn’t as clear or concise as I think it could be. The rule set turned out to be so simple and elegant, but I had put off playing for so long because I thought the game would be more fussy than it turned out to be. (By a long shot!) Rules sometimes don’t live where you would expect them to. The rules summary at the back of the book is missing details you would want. I plan to write up my own cheat sheet. (Maybe the act of doing so will humble me.)

Xenos Rampant is great. Evan mentioned that the Goonhammer review was so positive he didn’t think the game could live up to its hype, and yet it did! A game we will definitely return to. And yet, there is still something compelling about all that jank in actual 40K. A topic for another day.