PLAYTEST RECORD // SHOW YOUR WORK
FILED_FROM: REYKJANES ASH BOWL // TOTAL WAR
FILING_DATE: 2026-08-15
RESULT: VENT CHOIR 4-0 // T7
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BARCODE: SIG-BATREP-2026-08-15
医
OPERATOR TACTICS // SKIRMISH // RECONSTRUCTED
BOTH SURGEONS
WALKED
TOTAL WAR // 24 x 24 // LAST LIGHT CLOSED IT AT ROUND SEVEN
SKIRMISH // TOTAL WAR
REYKJANES // THE ASH BOWL
VENT CHOIR 4-0 // T7
BOTH MARKSMEN DOWN // ZERO CHOIR LOSSES
// ROLL IN THE OPEN // COUNT THE DICE // BLAME THE TERRAIN // FILE THE REPORT //
// OPERATOR TACTICS // SKIRMISH
Glass Rook spent all four hundred points on two long rifles and two field surgeons, then lost both rifles inside three rounds and could not lose the surgeons. Vent Choir won it four to nothing and still walked off the Ash Bowl without finishing the job.
BOTH SURGEONS WALKED
BY QUILL ADAIR
GAME: OPERATOR TACTICS // SKIRMISH
FILED: REYKJANES ASH BOWL // TOTAL WAR // 2026-08-15
TELEMETRY: RECONSTRUCTED // THE DICE ARE ON RECORD.
// DESK NOTE // M. KOSE
Kose here. Adair wanted the one scenario this desk had never filed, Total War, which hands you no objectives and no excuse: you remove them or you do not. What came back is the most useful list-building argument we have printed this year, and it is not really about the side that won.
// DEPLOYMENT
GAMEOperator Tactics // Skirmish, 400 points a side, standard 24 by 24
SCENARIOTotal War (Contact Bowl). No objectives. Destroy the opposing splice.
VENT CHOIRIndependent no-chip salvage splice out of the Reykjanes vent works. HEARTH (Breacher, Heavy Plate), KETTLE and FUME (Commandos), SALT (Medic). Scorched orange over steam grey, stencilled by hand.
GLASS ROOKProtectorate raven-lineage flight, mono-type. REEVE and PALL (Marksmen, 36 inch rifles), HAW and SEDGE (Medics). Matte black, bone flash at the beak.
TABLEA drained thermal lagoon quarry on the Reykjanes geothermal belt. Impassable turbine hall dead centre, two silica scrubber towers and two basalt spoil heaps in heavy cover, two sinter shelves in light, two vent fields as difficult ground. Night, steam at chest height.
WIN CONDITIONTwo victory points per enemy operator Out of Action. Full elimination ends the game at once. Otherwise the higher score stands at the cap.
TURN CAPEight rounds, cut to seven when the Climax rolled Last Light
The Ash Bowl holds heat the way a pan does, hours after anyone has turned the burner off. Reykjanes drained this lagoon eleven years ago and left the sinter shelves standing, pale and crusted over, with the vent fields still breathing up through them. At night the steam sits at about chest height and does not move. You can hear a boot break the crust from thirty feet away.
Glass Rook arrived first and did the sensible thing with it. There is exactly one piece of hard cover in the northern half of that quarry, a basalt spoil heap the quarry crews built out of their own overburden, and the flight put all four bodies inside it: two rifles up on the crest, a surgeon at each rifle’s back, close enough to work without anybody taking a step. It is a good position. It is also the only position, and that turns out to be the whole story.
Vent Choir came up the western wall in one bound, all four of them together, and they did not spread out on the way.
Reeve never got the rifle up. The first burst out of the scrubber tower caught him across the crest of the heap and the second one, from the other commando, found him again before he could get his shoulder behind the basalt. What that did to him was worse than the wounds. A marksman on ground like this works by bracing. He gives up an entire turn to settle the weapon, and in exchange the rifle stops caring what the other man is hiding behind. Reeve did not have an entire turn any more. He had one movement left in him and he spent it on a snap shot that jammed the weapon in his hands.
HE WAS THE BEST GUN ON THE TABLE. HE FIRED ONCE ALL NIGHT.
Pall did better, and it mattered less than it should have. He had spent that first exchange bracing exactly the way the doctrine tells him to, and he was holding a shot that would ignore whatever the Choir put between themselves and it. Salt threw a canister at the ground between the two positions to take that away from him and put it five yards downwind, where it did nothing for anybody. Then Salt threw the second canister directly onto Pall’s head, and the aimed shot died in the murk with the man still holding it.
Hearth crossed the last four feet into Reeve while that was happening. A breacher is a slow, ugly thing to have walking at you, four inches a turn inside plate that ordinary fire cannot open, and a marksman’s kit has no answer to one at arm’s length. Reeve went down under the hammer. Hearth turned on the surgeon crouched behind him in the same motion and put her on the ground as well, and Haw got back up out of it only because she is very hard to kill and got lucky twice in a row.
Then the Choir’s plan ran into the sentence they had read wrong.
Fume charged Pall to pin him, on the theory that a rifle held inside a knife fight is a rifle that has stopped working, and that the contact does that job whether you win the exchange or lose it. Fume lost the exchange. What the book actually says is that the loser stays in the grip. So Fume was the one held, bleeding, nose to nose with a man who still had a braced shot and now had a clean line at a range of about a yard. Pall put both barrels into him and left him one wound short of the ground.
Pall was dead ten minutes later. Kettle came through the basalt and broke him twice with the knife, and it was Fume, who could barely stand and had one movement left in him, who finished it. The marksman who had nearly killed him was put down by the man he had nearly killed.
That settled it, four to nothing, in the third round of seven. Everything after that was two field surgeons refusing to die.
Kettle charged Sedge and went over on the crust. Hearth charged Haw and went over too, and her blade skated off the plate without finding a seam. Fume charged Sedge and fumbled that one as well: three in a row, three professional assault operators on their faces in front of two women whose entire offensive training is a sidearm they are bad with. Sedge won all three of those exchanges and strolled away from every one, because the grip only ever holds the one who lost it.
Salt spent the back half of the night working. He brought Fume from one wound off the ground back to no wounds at all across two turns, which is the entire reason the Choir’s casualty line reads the way it does.
The light went early in the bowl, the way it does. Both surgeons were still upright when it did, three wounds into each of them and neither one finished. Neither had killed anyone. Neither was ever going to. They simply could not be made to stop.
// THE TAPE
SETZone choice Choir 1 / Rook 6. Glass Rook takes the north edge and deploys first, putting all four inside the North Spoil Heap in gun-and-surgeon pairs. Vent Choir deploys second, in one lane up the west wall, clear of the vent field.
T1Priority Choir 4 / Rook 1. All four Choir models bound into the West Scrubber Tower. KETTLE Rapid Fire at REEVE, needing 5+ through heavy cover: 6, 4. FUME Rapid Fire, same target: 2, 6. Two natural sixes in four dice, two Mortal Wounds, REEVE capped at one action. STEADY AIM costs both actions, so it is now unavailable to him. His forced snap shot needed a raw 7+ and came up a natural 1: Dry Fire, rifle jammed. PALL banks Steady Aim. HEARTH walks to 4 inches off REEVE.
T2Priority Choir 6 / Rook 4. SALT smoke TACT 3, failed, scattered 5 inches northeast and screened nothing. Second canister thrown onto PALL, TACT 4, landed: the banked aimed shot is blind. REEVE lands his own smoke on a natural 6. HEARTH charges REEVE 7 to 2, armor check 5: REEVE OUT OF ACTION. Hearth’s second swing into HAW is a natural 6, armor check 3: Mortal Wound. HAW breaks the grip on a natural 6. FUME charges PALL and rolls a natural 1, which always loses and overrides attacker-wins-ties, so the FIGHT Bad marksman beats a Commando; armor check 5 wounds Fume and pins him. Choir spends an Edge to strip the resulting Breach Token. PALL then fires the banked shot point blank: natural 6, Mortal Wound, the stripped token redundant. Second shot 5 hits. FUME on two Mortal Wounds.
T3Priority tied 3-3. No tie rule exists in Skirmish; reroll per the solo-book fix, Choir 5 / Rook 3. KETTLE into PALL twice: natural 6 (armor 2) then natural 6 again against Pall’s own natural 1 (armor 3). Two Mortal Wounds, one action left. FUME, on two Mortal Wounds with a single action, swings back: natural 6, armor check 5. PALL OUT OF ACTION, 4-0. Glass Rook hits 2 of 4 down and the Contact Ceiling triggers. SEDGE passes GUTS on 3 and Stabilizes HAW on 4, downgrading the Mortal Wound and restoring her second action. SALT reaches FUME, Stabilize 5.
T4Priority Rook 5 / Choir 2, the flight’s first win, and they elect to activate second. Choir hands its lost action to FUME, already capped at one by his wounds, so the penalty costs nothing. KETTLE runs 12 inches and charges SEDGE: natural 1, auto-loss to a medic, armor check 2 absorbed, and Kettle is the one pinned while she walks away. SALT Stabilizes FUME on a natural 6: Mortal Wound removed outright, Fume completely clean.
T5Priority Rook 5 / Choir 1. HEARTH charges HAW: natural 1, auto-loss, and her armor check of 3 cannot beat Heavy Plate AR3, so the plate holds and the breacher is pinned by a surgeon who then walks off. FUME charges SEDGE at the exact limit of his reach: natural 1, a third straight fumbled Choir charge, armor check 5 wounds him. SALT dresses it off with no roll. Round five ends with the Pressure Clock still on 1, so the Climax fires automatically: D6 6, LAST LIGHT. The game now ends at round seven.
T6Priority Rook 3 / Choir 1. KETTLE wins 7 against a natural 1 but the armor check of 1 is absorbed. HAW’s first break attempt is a natural 1, an auto-failure that no Edge can buy, so the spend is refused rather than consumed and she takes the wound; her second attempt is a natural 6 and she is clear. FUME wounds SEDGE, and Glass Rook burns its only Breach Token forcing his reroll, which comes back worse-result-unchanged. Sedge answers with a natural 6 that would be a Mortal Wound, and the Choir’s own Breach Token forces her reroll down to a 5. Fume wins instead and wounds her again.
T7Priority Rook 6 / Choir 1, the flight’s fourth straight. KETTLE wounds HAW to three Flesh Wounds; she breaks free on a natural 6. FUME catches SEDGE, first armor check of 1 absorbed, and she answers with another natural 6; the Choir’s last Breach Token forces the reroll down to a 2 and Fume wounds her instead. SEDGE breaks free on a natural 6 as the clock expires. VENT CHOIR 4, GLASS ROOK 0.
// WORKBENCH
// HOW IT ACTUALLY PLAYED
Start with the thing that built this matchup, because it is a hard edge in the points and most people will never notice it. Glass Rook wanted two long rifles, a commando to screen them and a surgeon. That list costs 410. The budget is 400. There is no way to shave it, because loadouts are fixed at Skirmish scale and the Medic at 90 is already the cheapest body in the book. The cheapest legal four-model list containing two Marksmen is therefore two Marksmen and two Medics, at exactly 400 and not a point under. Glass Rook did not choose to field two surgeons. The ten points chose for them.
So we ran it, and the answer is that the list has no floor. Two rifles at 36 inches and two Medics who shoot at Bad means every enemy that survives to contact is unopposed forever, and a Commando or a Breacher who reaches you is not a threat you manage, it is a threat you have already lost to. The flight never fired a shot at anything except a man standing in its own faces.
The turn it swung was the first one, and it swung on a mechanism rather than on the two sixes that started it. Dropping Reeve to one action did not just halve his output. It deleted Steady Aim, because Steady Aim costs both actions, and Steady Aim is the only tool a Marksman has for beating heavy cover. Wound a marksman once and you do not slow him down, you remove his entire answer to terrain and leave him throwing unaimed dice at a 7+ he cannot roll. That is a death spiral with no brake on it, and it is worth deciding on purpose whether you want it in the game.
The other genuine finding is a single sentence in the melee rules. “Locked. Loser stays in contact.” Vent Choir read that as a mutual pin and built their whole assault on it, charging in on the theory that contact takes a rifle off the table whether the charge lands or not. It does not. Only the loser is held, and the winner is free to stroll away, which means a failed charge pins the charger and hands the defender a free disengage. Sedge beat three separate charges and left all three men standing in the crust behind her. If that is intended, it is a lovely rule and nobody knows about it. If it is not, it needs one clause.
Dice. Fifteen natural sixes across the night, eight of them to the losing side, which tells you how little the raw luck decided. Nine natural ones. The Choir threw four of them and every single one was a charge, which is the funniest and most instructive stat on the sheet: their fumbles all landed on the one action type where a natural 1 hands the initiative to a medic. Glass Rook won every priority roll from round four onward, four in a row, and lost by four.
Balance read. Total War is clean and it is honest, and it has one hole: there is no forcing mechanism. Once the Choir was ahead, two Medics at MOBI 6 could outrun two Commandos at MOBI 6 indefinitely, and the last four rounds were a footrace on a 24 by 24 board that neither side could resolve. Last Light shortening the game was a mercy. Without that Climax result we would have filed two more rounds of the same chase.
- Try next: run Total War with a shrinking board or an escalation clock. The Competition variant in the reader already prints one (all cover drops a category at round four, plus one to all Shoot at round six). Use it. Elimination scenarios need a reason to close.
- Try next: give the two-rifle flight a real screen by dropping to three models. Two Marksmen and one Commando is 320, leaves 80 unspent, and is almost certainly a better army than the 400-point version that spends the difference on a second surgeon.
- Terrain note: one impassable block in the centre plus one piece of heavy cover per half produced a table where the deployment decision was effectively made for both players. If you want a real Total War, build three or four contested cover pieces, not two.
- Kit note: the Ash Bowl is the easiest terrain build on this list. Grey foam offcuts for the sinter shelves, a lagoon floor drybrushed bone over rust, cotton wool at chest height on wire for the steam. The vent fields are just cork chips and a wash.
Rules flagged this run, all logged to the backlog: Skirmish has no smoke rule at all, despite smoke sitting in three class loadouts and the End Phase clearing it; Steady Aim never says whether the banked shot survives movement; the melee sequence never references the FIGHT attribute, which would make a Medic exactly as good in a knife fight as a Commando; the Locked clause above; and there is no Priority tie-breaker, even though the solo book was given a reroll-on-tie back in June. We ruled all five in the open and played on.
// DISPOSITION
RESULTVENT CHOIR WINS 4-0. Game ended at the close of round seven on the Last Light Climax. Both Glass Rook marksmen Out of Action; no full elimination, so no early finish.
CASUALTIES // VENT CHOIRNone. FUME reached two Mortal Wounds in round two and finished the game with no wounds at all. Hearth, Kettle and Salt were never hit. The splice left the bowl at full strength.
CASUALTIES // GLASS ROOKREEVE Out of Action, round two. PALL Out of Action, round three. HAW and SEDGE both survived on three Flesh Wounds each and both walked off the table.
MVPSALT, Medic, Vent Choir. Never fired a shot all night. Put the canister on Pall’s head that killed the only aimed shot the flight ever banked, then rolled a 5 and a natural 6 on consecutive Stabilizes to bring Fume back from one wound off the ground to completely clean, then dressed off the last wound with no roll. The zero in the casualty column is his.
TOP GUNKETTLE, Commando. Three natural sixes, and he opened Reeve and broke Pall twice. He also fumbled two charges onto his face, which is the game in miniature.
RUN IT YOURSELF:
OT SKIRMISH & IRON LINE // Total War is scenario six, and the Contact Bowl map is printed with it.
THE GRIP ONLY EVER HOLDS THE ONE WHO LOST IT.