Ulikton, Soon on This Blog!

I've found the time to review and put together in a readable document the rules of Ulikton. I've sent it to the author, asking for a little "foreword" and permission for sharing. He is such a nice guy, but actually a little forgetful (I mean, pathologically: his medium-term memory is virtually non-existent), so the entire process may take a while. By the way, I can turn it into a 10 page or so booklet, or into two, two-sided, letter-format sheets of paper: which of these formats would you prefer? Please don't answer "both". Also, it probably needs a better subtitle than "Minimalistic Mecha Wargames Engine", so feel free to suggest one.

The only thing I can assure you of, is that if you liked Wargames for Anarchists you'll love Ulikton. You won't believe how close the concept is, even down to the fact that the first draft of Ulikton was written in 1986 or so.

Ulikton, The Rules

So, these are the rules of Ulikton, The Minimalistic Mecha Wargames Engine.

Equipment: Paper and pencil, miniatures or tin soldiers or whatever, hex battlemat, a 20-sided die for each player, some d6s, d8s, d10s and d12s.

Core Rules

Round: Combat Round is 5 seconds long. Because of this, and because the Mecha are some 10 tons of heavy robot, commands cannot be imparted in real-time by pilots. Therefore before a round starts, every player writes down his Actions (2 to 5 per Round, depending on the Mecha.) Actions can be whatever you want: shoot, move, climb, jump, hover, etc. Every act requires an Action, except for some special acts that are free. Once the Round begins, each Action takes place simultaneously (everyone's first, second, third and so on.)

Combat: Roll a d20, hit on 5+. Each weapon deals fixed damage, armor absorb damage but also gets damaged. You can Parry (1 Action) or Dodge (1 Action), by rolling a d20 scoring more than the attacker's score. If you Parry you have a +5 on your roll. Once you score a hit, roll a d12 (or a d8 or a d10) to find the hit location according to the following table: 1-5 main, 6 left leg, 7 right leg, 8 left arm, 9 right arm, 10 head, 11 main weapon, 12 critical. Critical Subtable: 1-2 generator, 3-4 sensors, 5-6 second cabin. Each Mecha has its hit location table in its description.

And that's all! The document then has about seven pages of pre-generated Mecha. I've called the author this evening, and he told me that the game was derived directly from a roleplaying game called "Mekton", don't know if anyone has ever heard of it. By the way, it's very fast to play, and really fun. I wish I had the time to fix and edit the rules to play it again. "So little time, so much to do", as always.

Ulikton, The Minimalistic Mecha Wargames Engine

Ulikton

Some months ago, when I played in the Temple of Elemental Evil campaign, one of the players (now DM in an upcoming first edition campaign) had us playing a Wargame written by himself, called Ulikton (the guy in question in named Ulysses.) It was tons of fun! I'm not a huge fan of mecha myself, but actually the game was really, damn simple (one page of rules and some four pages of stats or thereabouts.) I wish I could play it again – maybe I should hire some friends and give it another shot.

The rules, as I said, were really simple: you play on a hex-battlemat, you have rounds, during the rounds you carry out some actions according to your mecha of choice, and if you shoot you hit with 5+ on a d20 and if you hit you score fixed damage by weapon (yes, combat is that deadly!) Therefore the focus is on strategy rather than anything else. Also, being a roleplaying game derived wargame, you can make any number of weird actions that are judged on their merits ("Yeah fuck I shot that stupid building on my line of fire!") Real good times.