PLAYTEST RECORD // SHOW YOUR WORK
FILED_FROM: SCSF OPEN WATER // MARITIME INTERDICTION
FILING_DATE: 2026-06-05
RESULT: HVT SURVIVES // 1 HP
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BARCODE: SIG-BATREP-2026-06-05
滅
OPERATOR TACTICS // HVT // RECONSTRUCTED
ONE PIP
SHORT
MARITIME INTERDICTION // MEDIUM
HVT // CARD GAME
MARITIME INTERDICTION
MEDIUM // 3 OPS // NO MEDIC
HVT SURVIVES // 1 HP
TEAM 3/3 KIA
// ROLL IN THE OPEN // COUNT THE DICE // BLAME THE TERRAIN // FILE THE REPORT //
// OPERATOR TACTICS // HVT
A three-operator strike team boards a moving vessel to take an arms broker sitting on three points of health, and a natural one on the first card kills the commander before the deck is even clear. What is left is one driver who knows boats, two clean hits on the target, and a last roll that comes up a single pip short.
ONE PIP
BY RIO SOLVENG
GAME: OPERATOR TACTICS // HVT
FILED: SCSF OPEN WATER // MARITIME INTERDICTION // 2026-06-05
TELEMETRY: RECONSTRUCTED // THE DICE ARE ON RECORD.
// DESK NOTE // M. KOSE
Three operators went up a moving hull for a target sitting on three points of health, and the run ended with three dead operators and that same target sitting on one. I keep this one because the plan was correct and lost anyway, which is the most honest thing dice ever do.
// DEPLOYMENT
GAMEOperator Tactics // HVT. Card game, solo, Medium difficulty.
SCENARIOMaritime Interdiction // nuclear materials aboard a moving SCSF vessel, open water, narrow transfer window.
STRIKE TEAMMaj. Fatou Balde, Commando (Init) // Naima "Corsair" Diop, Driver-Pilot // Mirren "Crowbar" Voss, Technician. No medic drawn.
TARGETColm "The Ledger" Ashby, arms distribution broker. 3 HP. Vulnerability: Navigation (Driver-Pilot 2+). Counter profile rolled Heavy Artillery (2+).
TABLEFive-card gauntlet as the boarding, then the confrontation in the cargo hold.
OBJECTIVEClear five challenges, then reduce Ashby to 0 HP.
WIN CONDHVT at 0 HP within three confrontation turns. Lose if all operators KIA or the turns expire with him alive.
TURN CAP5 gauntlet challenges, then 3 confrontation turns.
Open water gives you no perimeter to draw. The deck pitches a few degrees with every swell and there is nothing on it to anchor a line to, so Balde drew one in her head the way commandos do, marked the bow ladder as the edge of the world, and went over it first. She was the only one of the three who could move through a loud room without paying for it. That was the plan. Put the commander into the noise, keep the driver clean for the part that mattered.
The noise answered before the team was off the ladder. Ashby kept militia on the foredeck with area weapons and bad intentions, and the first exchange took Balde off her feet and did not give her back. Tag went cold on her inside ten seconds. The team was down a commander and its only fast mover, and the boarding was four cards from over.
Voss took the ship's nervous system next. The vessel was running a jamming stack that cut her off the moment she patched in, and for a while she was alone in the dark with a deck full of strangers and a channel full of static. The ship hit her once before she found the seam.
Then it handed her back. The next compartment was post-war pipe, charges tucked into the junction boxes the way every cheap retrofit hides them, and Voss read the whole ugly mess on the first pass. The disarm went so clean it bought back what the jammer had taken off her. She came up off the floor still working.
THE SHIP TRIED TO KILL HER. THEN IT HANDED HER BACK.
Diop owned the next stretch. She runs maritime routes for a living and reads a hull the way Specter operators read dune country, so the flooded lower compartments and the dead-end service runs were just another chart to her. She moved through the maze without leaving a mark on herself. For one card, the run looked survivable.
Voss spent the last of the boarding on the cargo. There was a complication in the hold, the kind the briefing files flatten into a single line and the deck never does, and it went wrong the way the worst ones go wrong, all at once and with no warning. Crowbar did not come back from it. Diop was the last operator breathing on a ship that still had its owner on it.
She found Ashby in the hold with the cargo he had no intention of leaving behind. The Ledger does not panic. He had a deck gun crew, a launch in the water, and the simple math of a man who only needs to live three more minutes. Diop had one advantage and it was the whole game. She knew the boat better than he did. The first pass put a hit on him. The second pass put another. Two points off a three-point man, with his gun crew swinging onto her between rounds.
The second burst caught her. She stayed up, slower now, and a step slower is the gap between the shot you make and the shot you almost make. On the last pass she had him cold. One point left on him, one clean motion to take it. At full speed that motion lands. Slowed, it missed by the width of a hand. Ashby stepped off onto his own boat while the gun crew finished what the sea had not. The Makali margin on this one was three, and the desk paid all of it.
// THE TAPE
C1Hostile Contact (init). Balde, Good 2+. Variable 3, threshold 4+. Rolled 1. Natural one, instant KIA. Commander and the team's only Init gone on the first card.
C2Hostile Electronics (init). Voss, Good 2+, no Init so Pressure minus 1. Variable 2, 4+. Rolled 4, minus 1 equals 3. Fail. Voss Wounded.
C3Rigged Infrastructure. Voss now Wounded, dropped to Ordinary 4+. Variable 4, 4+. Rolled 6. Critical success, cleared and recovered to Active.
C4Infrastructure Maze. Diop, Good 2+. Variable 2, 4+. Rolled 4. Clean pass, no state change.
C5Asset Complication. Voss, Bad 5+. Variable 4, effective 5+. Rolled 1. Natural one, instant KIA. Diop is the last one standing.
CONFConfrontation. Ashby counter profile roll 1, Heavy Artillery, hits on 2+. The worst of his three profiles for a lone survivor.
T1Diop Navigation 2+, rolled 2, hit. Ashby 3 to 2. Ashby counter 2+, rolled 1, miss. Diop clean.
T2Diop Navigation 2+, rolled 2, hit. Ashby 2 to 1. Ashby counter 2+, rolled 5, hit. Diop Wounded, Navigation drops to 4+.
T3Diop Navigation 4+ while Wounded, rolled 3, a miss by one. Three turns expire, HVT alive. Ashby counter rolled 6, Diop KIA. Team wiped.
// WORKBENCH
// HOW IT ACTUALLY PLAYED
The dice were teeth out all game, and not in our favor. Three natural ones came up on the operator side and two of them were instant kills, which is the worst thing that can happen on a five-card gauntlet. Ashby then rolled the one counter profile that misses only on a one. The plan was sound. The variance was not survivable.
The turn it swung was the second confrontation round. Ashby's counter landed and bumped Diop from Active to Wounded, and that single step moved her Navigation from 2+ to 4+. Her last roll was a three. At 2+ that is a kill and the desk goes home with a receipt. At 4+ it is a miss, and the whole run dies in the gap between those two numbers.
- Dice vs decisions: the decisions were clean. Send the only Init operator into the only loud Init card, spend the technician on her own systems, keep the driver pristine for the kill. None of that lost the game. The opening card order, two Init cards stacked at the front against a one-Init team, plus a first-card natural one, did.
- Balance read: at Medium with no medic drawn, a wound only comes off on a critical six or a Recover roll, and for a lone survivor the Recover line costs the exact turn you need to attack. Against the Heavy Artillery profile (2+, misses only on a one) a single survivor is running a one-hit buffer into a near coin flip every round. That thread is very thin.
- One thing to try next: a gauntlet re-order or re-draw rule so two Initiative cards cannot stack at the front against a team carrying one Init operator. Or hand the last survivor a small concession, Recover at 4+ instead of 5+, so the no-medic line is a fight and not a dead end.
- Rulings logged: the gauntlet never says whether a natural-one crit fail still clears the card or forces a re-attempt. The desk cleared it and killed the operator, which keeps the run at five deployments. The HVT counter profile is "a D6 roll" with no printed pip-to-attack map, so the desk read 1-2 / 3-4 / 5-6 across the three listed attacks. Both are in the QA log.
- Terrain aside: a moving-platform mission is the cleanest excuse in the whole line to build a deck on a tilt. Foamcore wedge under a cargo-ship section, everything canted a few degrees off level, and the table tells the story before the first die hits it.
// DISPOSITION
RESULTHVT survives on 1 HP. Three confrontation turns expired with Ashby alive. Mission failed, team lost.
CASUALTIES // TEAM3 of 3 KIA. Balde (C1, natural one), Voss (C5, natural one), Diop (confrontation T3).
CASUALTIES // HVT2 of 3 HP. Ashby walked off on his last point.
MVPNaima "Corsair" Diop. The only operator to reach the target, both hits on Ashby were hers, and she missed the kill by one pip after a wound. The entire offense, start to finish.
RUN IT YOURSELF:
OT HVT // solo, Medium, draw your own gauntlet and see if your vulnerability key survives the deck.
AT FULL SPEED IT LANDS. SLOWED, IT MISSED BY THE WIDTH OF A HAND.