PLAYTEST RECORD // SHOW YOUR WORK
FILED_FROM: SOLAR BELT // OPERATION SUNSTROKE
FILING_DATE: 2026-06-05
RESULT: LOOP RUPTURES // 2 OF 4
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BARCODE: SIG-BATREP-2026-06-05
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OPERATOR TACTICS // THREAT RESPONSE // RECONSTRUCTED
TWO OF
FOUR
THE CLOCK WAS IN THE WALLS
THREAT RESPONSE // SOLO
OPERATION SUNSTROKE
LOOP RUPTURES // 2 OF 4
CLOCK COMPRESSED // T7 → T5
SECONDARY COMPLETE
// ROLL IN THE OPEN // COUNT THE DICE // BLAME THE TERRAIN // FILE THE REPORT //
// OPERATOR TACTICS // THREAT RESPONSE
A three-operator splice runs the solo clock against a sabotaged solar tower, reads the whole board on a natural twenty, then watches a single event roll cut the window in half and bury the win one round out of reach.
TWO OF FOUR
BY QUILL ADAIR
GAME: OPERATOR TACTICS // THREAT RESPONSE
FILED: SOLAR BELT // OPERATION SUNSTROKE // 2026-06-05
TELEMETRY: RECONSTRUCTED // THE DICE ARE ON RECORD.
// DESK NOTE // M. KOSE
The solo book promises a mission that gets worse if you stall. This one got worse if you did everything right, which is a different and more honest lesson. Read it for the event roll that ended a fight nobody lost on the table.
// DEPLOYMENT
GAMEOperator Tactics // Threat Response (solo system), Mission Builder one-shot
SCENARIOOperation Sunstroke. A sabotaged molten-salt thermal store at a concentrated-solar tower, rigged to vent burning salt onto a civilian water-recovery township downslope. Self-pressurizing countdown. Extreme heat condition.
OPERATORA three-operator splice: Vesper (Infiltrator), Auger (Tech Specialist, the hacker), Brack (Commando, the gun).
THREATEastern Compact deniable contract garrison, motivation Paid. Two Grunts, two Soldiers, one Veteran cohort lead (the Warden, Shielded), one Heavy bear-gunner (the Anchor, Entrenched). Fog of war, four patrol tokens.
TABLEFive zones over a heliostat mirror field at dawn: insertion edge, service-lane approach, the central tower base, an open salt-pipe kill plaza, and a far maintenance rail spur. The win sits up a vertical climb to the control mezzanine.
OBJECTIVESafe the salt loop. Bank four Override successes at the mezzanine control station before the rupture. Secondary: identify the garrison motivation before Round 4.
WIN CONDITIONFour banks before the clock = loop safed, township saved. Anything short = it ruptures.
TURN CAPRupture at end of Round 7, later compressed to end of Round 5 by an event.
The mirror field was already warming when the splice came out of the long shadows at the field edge. Ten thousand heliostats turning to catch a sun that was not all the way up yet, and at the center of them the collector tower, and inside the tower a salt loop that somebody had taught to overpressure. Downslope, past the open ground, a water-recovery township that did not know it was the target. The brief called the loop a countdown. The operators called it the clock in the walls, because there was no wrist to read and nothing to negotiate with.
Vesper went first and went quiet. She lifted the insertion cache off a maintenance locker without a sound and came up holding two frags and a signal jammer, then drifted into the service lanes while Brack walked the lead and Auger, the one who actually had to win this, hugged the cover behind him. The garrison had not noticed anyone yet. Eastern Compact colors, deniable, paid to sit on the tower and let the township boil. Paid crews leave when the math turns. The whole job was turning it before the salt did.
Then Vesper put her hand on a control junction in the second lane and the entire site opened up to her. Every interlock. Every guard rotation. The bear-gunner welded to the station up top and the exact four commands that would bleed the loop safe. For one clean breath the splice knew everything.
FOR ONE CLEAN BREATH THE SPLICE KNEW EVERYTHING.
Knowing is not time. At the top of the third round the tower answered the read with one of its own. A pressure spike ran the length of the salt line and the window the operators had been counting on folded in half. Seven rounds became five. The math that had been tight became a math that did not close, and nobody on the table had fired a wrong shot to earn it.
They went loud anyway, because the township was downslope and there was nothing else to do with the time that was left. Vesper had paid for the alarm in advance, a silent knife on a sentry before the noise, one body banked toward a break that would never come. Brack opened on the gunner and the wall the gunner stood behind, and the wall won twice. The frag meant for the cluster at the tower base sailed wide into an empty lane. And the bears, when their turn came, rolled the kind of dice you remember. Two sixes back to back, one into Auger as he reached the mezzanine, one into Vesper in the open, and the round that should have broken the garrison broke the splice instead.
Auger climbed into the steam and worked the station with a bear-gunner standing on it. He got the first command in under fire. He got the second because the team spent its last guaranteed thing to make sure of it. Two of four. He was reaching for the third when the loop came due and the salt came up through the grating, and the two interlocks he had managed held just enough of the pressure to turn an erasure into a scorch. Vesper and Brack went out the back under fire, carrying nothing. Auger did not come with them.
// THE TAPE
T1Vesper lifts the insertion cache, D20 13, two frags and a signal jammer. A SITREP of 5 keeps the garrison blind to Brack's lead. P1 reads as two grunts.
T2Lost priority 4 to 6. Vesper's second marker comes up a natural 20, the full picture: two tempo, the mezzanine guard revealed, the climax read. End-of-turn comms intercept ids the garrison as paid. Secondary done, a third tempo banked.
T3Vesper's surprise knife lands on a 4, one grunt gone, silent. Auger reaches the tower base undetected on a 2. Event phase rolls 4-5, pressure / major, clock compression: the window halves, rupture jumps to end of T5.
T4Frag throw comes up a natural 1, scatters left into an empty lane, fumble leaves Vesper exposed. Jammer drops, reinforcements cancelled. Brack rapid fire 2 and 2, both miss. Threat phase: Heavy nat 6 crits Auger, base Soldier nat 6 crits Vesper, Warden adds one. Vesper at full flesh.
T5Brack 4 and 3 on the Heavy, two tempo turn one into a hit, the bear stays on the station. Auger banks override one on a 4 under fire, override two on the last failsafe. Two of four. Threat phase mortals both Auger and Vesper, the Warden whiffs a nat 1, a grunt crits Brack on a 6. Extraction SITREP 2, no clean break. Auger fails the vent, out of action. Loop ruptures.
// WORKBENCH
// HOW IT ACTUALLY PLAYED
The read on this one is brutal and clean. The splice did not lose on a decision, it lost on the event deck. The plan was sound the whole way: spend stealth early to bank a body before the alarm, push Auger up the center, go loud on your own terms. Then turn three rolled pressure at major severity, clock compression, and cut the runway from four working rounds to two. Auger needed two rounds on the station and the table only ever handed him one.
The turn it swung was T3, and it was not a shot or a charge. It was a 2D6 event read of 4 and 5. Everything after it was the splice trying to outrun a number, and the two natural sixes the bears threw on T4 made sure they could not.
- The self-pressurizing event can double-pressurize. A mission that already ruptures at end of clock probably should not also be eligible for clock compression on the universal table, or the compression should be capped when a hard rupture clock is already live. Right now the single worst event in the deck lands hardest on the missions least able to absorb it.
- Extended Operations have no rule for a defender on the objective. The book defines the op, and defines contested intel recovery, but never the case where a Heavy is welded to the console you have to work. Ran the station as contested by analogy: every override drew a free shot and lost its auto-success. It decided the game and it was a house call.
- The natural 20 is a tease, not a tool. The full picture handed over the whole board and two tempo, and almost none of it could be spent into a two-round clock. Great intel, no time to use it. Thematically perfect, competitively useless, which may be the point of a solo game about information.
- Try next: field three operators who can all work the station, or start the hacker one zone closer. A single-hacker bottleneck plus a compressible clock is a coin flip you lose.
Terrain-wise this table wants to be built tall. The whole fight is a climb to a mezzanine over a kill plaza, and a heliostat field of mirror pylons is the rare board where dawn shadows are honest cover and the sun line starts to matter by midgame. Paint the salt pipes like they are already failing, because by the last round they are.
// DISPOSITION
RESULTPrimary failed. The loop ruptures with two of four interlocks engaged: a partial vent, township scorched not erased, evacuation time bought. Secondary complete (motivation identified on Turn 2).
CASUALTIES // SPLICEAuger out of action, lost in the vent on the mezzanine. Vesper one mortal wound. Brack two flesh wounds. Vesper and Brack exfil under fire.
CASUALTIES // GARRISONOne Grunt (silent kill, T3). The garrison held the site and never reached its paid break of three.
MVPVesper. The natural-20 read, the silent kill, the jammer that cut reinforcements, and a mortal wound survived on the Warden's nat-1. She won every phase except the only one that counted.
HE GOT TWO OF FOUR AND THE SALT CAME UP THROUGH THE GRATING.