PLAYTEST RECORD // SHOW YOUR WORK
FILED_FROM: EURASIAN STEPPE // GRID 4-FOXTROT
FILING_DATE: 2026-06-04
RESULT: SPECIMEN DOWN // T3
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BARCODE: SIG-BATREP-2026-06-04
狩
OPERATOR TACTICS // BIG GAME HUNTS // RECONSTRUCTED
LAST
BOX
HUNT 01 // IRON GRASS // VEPR FEROX // KILL ORDER
BIG GAME // HUNT 01
IRON GRASS // KILL ORDER
SPECIMEN DOWN // T3
OPERATOR // 1 FW LEFT
// ROLL IN THE OPEN // COUNT THE DICE // BLAME THE TERRAIN // FILE THE REPORT //
// OPERATOR TACTICS // BIG GAME HUNTS
A kill order on a third-generation boar that had already walked off two contractor teams, run solo on the Eurasian steppe. Grouse read the specimen cold and still had to win it on the last die, on her last health box, with the one Tempo token she held in reserve.
LAST BOX
BY RIO SOLVENG
GAME: OPERATOR TACTICS // BIG GAME HUNTS
FILED: EURASIAN STEPPE // GRID 4-FOXTROT // 2026-06-04
TELEMETRY: RECONSTRUCTED // THE DICE ARE ON RECORD.
// DESK NOTE // M. KOSE
Kose here. A kill order on a third-generation boar that had already sent two contractor teams home empty, run solo by an operator who read every card right and then nearly threw the kill away twice on the dice. I keep this one because it is the cleanest argument we have that intel buys you the shot and the last die still gets a vote.
// DEPLOYMENT
GAMEOperator Tactics // Big Game Hunts (solo hunt)
SCENARIOHunt 01 // Iron Grass. BAFO Contract 447-F. Eurasian contested zone, grid 4-Foxtrot.
OPERATOREske Lund, callsign Grouse. Gene-forged veteran contractor, solo. Handler Kestrel, remote.
SPECIMENVepr Ferox alpha, Veteran tier. AR 2, Armored Charge, Adaptive Hide, Territorial. Plus one Grunt-tier juvenile near the den.
TABLEFive zones, insertion to extraction. Ferrite moss patches, a subsurface Talpic seismic crawler, stale autonomous EO platforms, a roaming EO patrol.
OBJECTIVEConfirmed kill of the alpha and a recovered tusk-plate as proof, then reach the vehicle.
WIN CONDITIONSpecimen Out of Action with proof secured. Loss on operator down or exfil without a kill.
TURN CAPClimax fires at Threat Phase 7 at the latest.
The brief said clean hunt, no competition. Kestrel said the brief was incomplete and left it at that. Grouse went in trusting the handler over the paperwork, which is the only reason the juveniles at the den did not surprise anyone.
She took the south line. The north corridor still has decommissioned EO gun-platforms walking their old patrols, firing at angles nobody updated, and an operator who blunders into one of those arcs gets shot for a war that ended weeks ago. The south costs time and crosses a glaciopuncture spike field, ground that punishes anyone in a hurry. Grouse was not in a hurry. She paced it, read the den from the moss edge before her optics went blind in the ferrite, and by the time she settled the long gun she knew the boar the way you know a room you grew up in.
That is the part worth sitting with. She had the whole animal mapped before she fired. The plate seam where the ceramic does not quite meet. The soft line under the third rib. The nerve cluster you leave alone unless you want it running. A Vepr Ferox is mostly armor and bad temper, and this one had already sent two teams home empty. Grouse found every weak place in it from forty meters out and never woke it.
Then she pulled the trigger and the steppe reminded her who actually runs these things.
A CLEAN READ DOES NOT PULL THE TRIGGER FOR YOU.
The first round found the seam perfectly and did nothing. That is the boar's whole trick. The hide soaks the first hit it takes every round, so a flawless opening shot just tells the animal where you are. Her follow-up, the one meant to put a round through the soft line and end it early, sailed wide by the worst margin the dice keep. The boar turned, found her, and came.
An armored charge is two and a half meters of plate and tusk arriving faster than it has any right to. Grouse planted and did not break, which is the only thing that kept her upright, and took the gore across the ribs for her trouble. The juvenile broke from the den and crashed in behind it. Now it was den work, point blank, an operator with one good gun against a thing built to absorb good guns, and a clock she could feel through her boots.
She solved it the way the read told her to. Spend the first shot of the round on nothing, let the hide waste itself, then drive the second round through the soft line for double. The boar went from whole to bleeding in one exchange. It gored her again. She was down to her last breath of slack and the juvenile was still swinging.
Round three she finished it, and she finished it ugly. The throwaway shot came up perfect and the hide ate it the way it was supposed to. The kill shot came up short by one. So she spent the one favor she had carried the whole hunt, the single token Kestrel slipped her at contact, and asked the dice to look again. They looked again. The soft line opened, the boar folded into the grass, and the juvenile decided its mother was not worth dying over and was gone before the echo cleared.
She cut the tusk-plate for proof and walked the kill zone slow, because the seismic crawler under that ground hits whatever makes the most noise and a dead boar makes none. The storm that could have killed her ride never came. The vehicle was where it said it would be. She rode out on her last health box with the proof in a bag and nothing behind her, which on the steppe counts as a good day.
// THE TAPE
PREThe Read 5, 5 (solo DC 3+), both good. Full anatomy mapped: vital organ, plate seam, behavioral trigger. Approach obstacles 5 / 3 / 5, three clean, no failures. Banked 1.5 Tempo and the alpha never oriented on the walk-in.
T1Lost priority 1 vs 3, spent 1 Tempo to fire first. Shot at the plate seam nat 6 crit, eaten by Adaptive Hide (round's first hit). Vital organ kill shot nat 1, wide. The boar charges. Grouse GUTS vs charge nat 6, holds her feet, then takes the gore (Vepr FIGHT 5) for 1 FW. Crawler timer set at D3 = 3 rounds.
T2Throwaway shot 3 hits, feeds the hide. Vital organ 5 hits for 2 FW: alpha 3 FW to 1 FW plus its single MW. Return: Vepr FIGHT 4 connects, Grouse down to her last FW box. Juvenile FIGHT 4, needed 5+, scrapes off the plate.
T3Throwaway nat 6 crit, eaten by the hide again. Vital organ kill shot 2, short by one. Spent last Tempo to reroll: 5, hit, 2 FW. Alpha Out of Action. Juvenile scatters per the card.
T4Buran-Complex check 6, no storm. Crawler surfaces in the kill zone; Grouse crosses quiet on TACT 2, no vibration to fix on. Vehicle live. Extracted with proof.
// WORKBENCH
// HOW IT ACTUALLY PLAYED
This hunt is a clean teaching case for the gap between intel and execution. Grouse rolled about as well as anyone can in the soft part of the game. Both Reads landed, all three Approach checks passed, and she walked into range of a Veteran specimen with the whole animal mapped and zero alert built up. Then the shooting handed her a natural 1 on the opening kill shot and a 2 on the second one. The read did not save those rolls. It just meant that when the dice finally cooperated, every hit was already aimed at the right place.
- The turn it swung: round three, the rerolled kill shot. Grouse was on her last health box with a live juvenile in melee. A second miss there and the next threat phase very likely puts her on the mortal track. The one Tempo token held back from contact is the whole margin of victory.
- Dice luck vs decisions: the decisions were close to optimal and the dice were streaky in both directions. Two natural 6s landed on hits the Adaptive Hide was always going to eat, and two kill shots whiffed. Holding a token in reserve is what converted bad variance into a win.
- Balance read: a Veteran Vepr with only 1 MW is a glass boss. Adaptive Hide makes it feel durable, but a single Vital Organ hit erases two of its four boxes. With the full anatomy read, this fight wanted to be over on round one, and only the dice kept it alive to round three. Tougher specimens may want a second MW.
- One thing to try next time: deny it the charge. Grouse stood and traded, which worked, but opening from a zone away and forcing the boar to spend activations closing would starve its Adaptive Hide of free first-hit absorbs and keep her off the mortal track entirely.
- Kit and terrain aside: the ferrite moss never mattered because she read the den before stepping into it, and the seismic crawler never bit because she killed in the den and crossed the kill zone slow. Two of the table's three big hazards stayed terrain instead of becoming threats. That is the hunt working as designed.
Rulings this run, all logged to the rules backlog. The Vepr's 1 MW track cannot actually enter the Cornered alert state the way the quick reference describes, so we treated its final box as Cornered. The specimen carries three different state vocabularies that never cross-walk. AR is never defined as a to-hit number or as a damage soak, so we ran it as a to-hit modifier. The proficiency-versus-fixed-DC question and the full Tempo spend menu are both undefined. Five gaps, none of them fatal, all of them the kind a second edition fixes in a sentence each.
// DISPOSITION
RESULTConfirmed kill. Hunt 01 cleared on Threat Phase 3. Top-tier payout: two-plus known anatomy hits, zero alarm, clean vehicle exfil.
CASUALTIES // OPERATORGrouse took 2 FW, survived on her last flesh-wound box. No mortal wounds.
CASUALTIES // SPECIMEN SIDEVepr Ferox alpha killed via Vital Organ. One juvenile scattered, alive. Seismic crawler, EO platforms, EO patrol and the Psovoi Kazan pack never engaged.
MVPThe long gun and the read that served it. The pre-contact anatomy map turned every hit into a placed hit, and the one Tempo token held in reserve bought the kill.
THE READ FOUND THE SEAM. THE LAST DIE STILL GOT A VOTE.