Dystopian Wars - Tiny Flyers rules revised!



So with Christmas came presents from Spartan games.

This post is going to cover the Tiny Flyer changes they made. You can find the PDF file for this here.

First things first. Wing sizes. These havent actually changed. Tiny Tokens could be no larger than a group of 5 anyway.

The main thing they have changed with the wings is the fact that all the tokens have the same fuel value, and must now touch another token within the wing.

Before you could have a unit of Tiny Flyers and have each Token moving off to do its own thing. The problem with this is that it became a problem tracking individual tokens and their fuel.

Now with them all remaining touching each other its much easier to know which token belongs to which wing.

Following on from that... Fuel. Love the concept not been too sure about the implementation of it. However now the fuel is for the Wing, not for individual Tokens. Again much easier to track, only 1D6, or counter.

I already have some ideas for how I want to represent this on the Battlefield. Hopefully there will be some pictures to show!

AckAck vs Tiny Flyers.

Given the previously mentioned rules changes this section had to change as well.

So now you figure out your AckAck vs the Wing and roll the dice. Any 6's remove one of the tokens from the Wing. You then count up the number of hits (ignoring the 6's) if you have the same number or more hits than there are tokens left in the Wing, then the whole Wing aborts, reducing its Fuel by 1.

Not 100% sure if the 6 allows you to re-roll a D6, but I dont see them having changed this somehow so until I see otherwise I assume its a Yes, a 6 will destroy a token and allow you another Roll.
They have also Clarified that an Abort result prevents any other actions being taken, be it Attacks, AckAck  etc. So if you suffer the Abort your Wing loses 1 fuel, not the 2 that you used to for initiating the attack (1 for attacking and 1 for the the abort).

Also it used to be that if your Tiny Tokens attacked a unit of Crusiers, each crusier would use all of its AckAck and target each token individually. This not only slowed the game down, but also weakened Tiny Tokens Effectiveness.

Now you can still do this, but in order to abort the rule, you need to get a number of Aborts equal to the number of tokens left after your attack.

So for example:

5 Tiny Tokens attack a Cruiser Squadron. Each Crusier has an AckAck of 4. So you can roll those 4 D6 from each Cruiser Seperately or you can link fire. If you link fire you will drop to 8 D6 in total, compared to 12D6 individually.

Example 1 - Individual AckAck

You roll your three sets of D6 scoring the following:

1,4,5,6 (with a the extra being a 4)
2,3,5,5
4,2,6,5 (with the extra being a 5).

So after all the AckAck you have Killed 2 Tokens (from the 6's), which leaves three in the Squadron. So you now need three 5's in any one of your sets to cause an abort. Because you only have 2 in two of them, and 1 in the other, the Tiny Tokens are allowed to continue their attack run.

Congratulations, thats now 9 AD hitting on 3's against your Cruiser. Ouch!

Example 2 - Linked AckAck.

So this time the Cruisers link their AckAck giving them a total of 8 (you half the AD for each ship linking after the first).

The scores on the doors are:

1,2,3,5,5,5,6,6 (extra rolls: 1,5)

So now you have killed two Tiny Tokens, and with 4 aborts (although three would have done) you have managed to force an abort, preventing the remaining three Tiny Tokens from attacking!

The PDF also includes a summary of all the Tiny Token Special Rules. It doesnt break them down by Nation which is frustrating, but this is something that is easy enough to work around. Just remember that all those rules do not apply to your Tiny Tokens. They are Nation specific.

Overall

Well Overall I feel this is an improvement on the Tiny Token rules. They are less clunkly to track, and this should speed the game up as its something less to keep track of.

I plan on building some bases to move my Wings on so it will take even less time to get them moved and sorted.

Hope this was helpful for you!

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