PLAYTEST RECORD // SHOW YOUR WORK
FILED_FROM: JAVA SCATTER // KALAPA TRANSFER // SECTOR 9 LANDWARD
FILING_DATE: 2026-07-20
RESULT: OBJECTIVE HELD // 3-2 // TRUCE STOOD
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BARCODE: SIG-BATREP-2026-07-20
網
OPERATOR TACTICS // SKIRMISH // RECONSTRUCTED
CROSSED
NET
KALAPA TRANSFER // TWO CREWS // ONE PAYMASTER
SKIRMISH // 500 PTS
KALAPA TRANSFER // HOLD & EXTRACT
OBJECTIVE HELD // 3-2
TRUCE // UNWRITTEN
// ROLL IN THE OPEN // COUNT THE DICE // BLAME THE TERRAIN // FILE THE REPORT //
// OPERATOR TACTICS // SKIRMISH
Five weeks after the Sector 9 capture, Brine Quist went looking for whoever stamps a crossed net on a chip and found Priya Sarn's crew already standing in the doorway, hired by the same hand. The table paid out for the two crews who stopped shooting at each other first.
CROSSED NET
BY QUILL ADAIR
GAME: OPERATOR TACTICS // SKIRMISH
FILED: JAVA SCATTER // KALAPA TRANSFER // SECTOR 9 LANDWARD // 2026-07-20
TELEMETRY: RECONSTRUCTED // THE DICE ARE ON RECORD.
// DESK NOTE // M. KOSE
Kose here. Adair asked to take the report himself on this one instead of the sidebar, and reading it I understand why. We have run two dispatches now where a rival crew walked away from a fight it could have taken. This is the game where the desk finally asks why, gets an answer, and does not like it much. Also: our first Skirmish in a while where nobody died and it still felt expensive.
// DEPLOYMENT
GAMEOperator Tactics // Skirmish. 500 points a side, three-way variant with a scripted third force.
SCENARIOHold & Extract at Kalapa Transfer — a landward copra-shed transfer point on the Sector 9 approach, Java Scatter. Two objectives: the receiving cage and the manifest desk.
FORCE AQuist crew. Mara "Brine" Quist (Infiltrator, lead), Sennen Ruiz "Kettle" (Breacher), Aditi Rahal "Pipe" (Tech). Daud on the boat, off-table, one call available.
FORCE BThe Menagerie. Priya Sarn "Cage" (Commando, lead), Bo Ferrer "Tallow" (Tech), two unnamed Grunt-tier handlers.
FORCE CCourier detail escorting the outbound crate. Four Grunt-tier, one Veteran-tier quartermaster. Activates on the scenario clock, not to a player.
TABLECopra sheds on stilts, a flooded loading apron, a raised catwalk spine, drying racks as soft cover, one working crane.
OBJECTIVEHold the manifest desk at end of game. Bonus for extracting the receiving cage's paper log intact.
TURN CAPFive turns. Force C arrives end of turn 2.
Everyone has been treating the crossed net as a claim mark. That was the reading in Sector 9 five weeks ago, when the Menagerie stood down over a tagged specimen and left a stamped chip on a piling instead of a fight, and it held up fine as long as nobody tested it. A claim mark means someone got there first. It is a polite thing. It lets a professional walk away without losing face.
Quist tested it. She had the chip in a jar on the boat for a month and eventually got tired of looking at it, and the trail off the stamp ran landward, away from the water she knows, to a copra transfer at the ragged edge of Sector 9 where a shed still receives crates that nobody in the Scatter admits to shipping.
She brought Kettle for the doors and Rahal for the desk, which is the correct three-person answer to a building. She did not bring enough for what was already inside it.
The Menagerie was on the catwalk before her people cleared the apron. Cage had the high spine, both firing lanes, and the patience to let Quist commit to the flooded ground before saying anything. In a Skirmish that is a won game. The desk's own scoring sheet had the Menagerie up before a die hit the table.
A CLAIM MARK SAYS MINE. THIS ONE SAYS SEND IT HERE.
Turn one was two crews finding out how badly they had both been briefed. Kettle blew the shed door and took a burst from Tallow's overwatch for it. Rahal made the manifest desk under fire and started reading. Cage's handlers rolled the flank and pinned Quist behind a drying rack that stopped roughly nothing. Two turns in, the Quist crew was one bad activation from a rout and the Menagerie was one activation from a clean sweep.
Then Rahal read the desk out loud on an open channel, which was either sloppy or the smartest thing anyone did all game, and both crews heard it at once. The manifest was not a shipping ledger. It was a receiving ledger. Crossed net in the left column, four decades deep, live specimens in and nothing out, and every consignment routed to a holding party the paper never once names.
Cage stopped shooting first. Adair's note in the margin of the tape says she was up on points and she stopped anyway, which is the only part of the game I still think about. Her people had been hired off the same broker sheet as Quist's, three hops apart, both told they were competing.
The courier detail arrived at the end of turn two into a table that had quietly changed shape. Their quartermaster came up the catwalk expecting to referee a firefight between two crews and instead took fire from both ends of it. That fight was short and it was not fair, and neither crew has apologized for it in any conversation I have had since.
Quist held the desk. The Menagerie held the cage. Nobody moved on the other, the clock ran out, and the desk scored it 3-2 on objectives in Quist's favor because a manifest weighs more than an empty cage. Cage did not contest the call. She walked her handlers out through the drying racks, and on the way past she told Quist that the mark had been on the Scatter longer than either of them had been working, which is the kind of line that sounds like a threat until you sit with it and hear it as a warning.
Daud had one call available all game and never used it. Afterward, back on the boat, he looked at the photographed manifest for a long minute and finally said where he had seen the crossed net before: on a shipping seal, years ago, on cargo he was told not to open, moving in the wrong direction — landward, inland, away from every port a specimen is supposed to leave from. He would not say for whom, and I do not think he was being coy. I think he does not know.
// THE TAPE
DEPMenagerie won the deployment roll 6 vs 2 and took the catwalk spine. Quist forced to the flooded apron, one Move to reach any hard cover. Pre-game Scout 4 (needed 4+) gave Brine one free reposition she spent moving Rahal, not herself.
T1Kettle breach charge 5, door down. Tallow overwatch nat 6 crit, Kettle takes 2 FW before he clears the frame. Rahal makes the desk on TACT 5. Cage holds her activation — did not fire once on turn one, which is what let the handlers roll the flank clean on 4, 5. Brine pinned, GUTS 3, holds but cannot advance.
T2Rahal reads the manifest, INT nat 6 — full contents on the first attempt, and per the open-channel house rule the read is public to every force on the table. Cage declines her shot on Brine (declared, not rolled). Force C arrives end of turn: quartermaster plus four onto the catwalk ramp.
T3Unwritten truce. Both crews shift fire to Force C. Kettle 5 and Tallow 4 drop two Grunts in the same activation window. Quartermaster returns fire into the Menagerie, Ferrer takes 1 FW. Brine flanks the ramp on TACT 6.
T4Quartermaster (Veteran, 3 FW / 1 MW) goes down to a crossfire nobody coordinated: Cage 5, Brine nat 6. Remaining two Grunts fail Break 2 and quit the table. Both crews stop firing at the same moment without a word passing between them.
T5Neither lead contests the other's objective. Brine holds the manifest desk, Cage holds the receiving cage. Clock out. Scored 3-2 (manifest 2, cage 1, extraction bonus to Quist). Zero KIA across both player forces.
// WORKBENCH
// HOW IT ACTUALLY PLAYED
I bylined this one because the interesting failure is a rules failure, and it is mine. Skirmish has no mechanism for what happened on turn three. Two player forces stopped fighting because of information, and the scenario had no way to price that, reward it, or stop it. We resolved it by agreement at the table and then spent an hour arguing about whether that was a game or a conversation.
- The turn it swung: turn two, Rahal's natural 6 on the manifest read. Everything before it was the Menagerie winning a positional game they had already won at deployment. Everything after it was a different scenario. One die changed the objective both crews were playing for.
- The open-channel house rule: we run intel reads as public if the reader is on comms, because it makes information a weapon instead of a private bonus. This is the first time it has cost the reading player the game they thought they were in. Keeping it.
- Dice luck vs decisions: the Menagerie out-rolled the Quist crew for two full turns and out-decided them at deployment. Cage's choice to hold her turn-one activation was correct and it built her a winning board. She then gave it away on information, on purpose, and I cannot find the rule that says she was wrong to.
- Balance read: the scripted third force is undertuned. A Veteran quartermaster with four Grunts is a speed bump against 1,000 points of players who decide to cooperate. If a scenario is going to allow a truce, Force C needs to be a genuine threat to both, or the truce costs nothing and means nothing.
- One thing to try next time: a Standing Arrangement token. Two opposed leads may agree to a truce once per game; both gain an activation, and at end of game the player with fewer objectives scores as if they held one more. Make the truce a legal move with a price and a payoff instead of a handshake outside the rules.
Rulings this run, all logged. Public-read timing is undefined (we resolved it as immediate, before the reader's force may act on it). Whether a declined shot still burns the activation is undefined (we burned it, which cost Cage the flank on turn three). Break tests for a scripted force have no listed modifier for losing their leader, so we used the standard minus one. Three gaps, one of them load-bearing.
// DISPOSITION
RESULTObjective held. Quist crew 3, Menagerie 2, clock out on turn five. Manifest photographed and extracted intact.
CASUALTIES // FORCE AKettle 2 FW (turn one overwatch crit), walking. Brine and Rahal untouched. No mortal wounds.
CASUALTIES // FORCE BFerrer 1 FW. Both handlers intact. Menagerie left the table under their own power and unpursued.
CASUALTIES // FORCE CQuartermaster Out of Action, two Grunts down, two broke and quit the table. No prisoners taken by either crew.
RECOVEREDReceiving ledger, forty-one years of entries, crossed-net column throughout. Live specimens received. Nothing logged as leaving. Holding party unnamed on every page.
MVPAditi Rahal. One check at the manifest desk turned a losing firefight into a shared problem. Honorable mention to Cage for stopping first.
FORTY-ONE YEARS OF THINGS ARRIVING. NOTHING EVER LEAVES.