Does Michael “Wheels” Whelan’s FREAKZ (Osprey, 2024) deliver on the dream of measureless movement in miniatures games?
I just picked up a copy of FREAKZ, and I love the look of the book so much. The Mike Mignola-looking art by Bonedust is golden. The game idea is cool, and I just built and primed a load of Strontium Dog miniatures, so I have models for it (I know, you are supposed to kit bash!)
Measureless Movement
This is the second of Osprey’s wargames to feature measureless movement, a style of movement rules that Glenn and I termed “zoned movement” in our new book, The Fundamentals of Tabletop Miniatures Games Design. While more than a decade old in the indie scene, measureless movement has still yet to truly enter the popular world of miniatures gaming (maybe we’ll see a GW game with it soon and that will change things), so its really interesting to examine examples as they are released, and see how they tackle the core issues of this style of movement.
Measureless movement is very much an open design area, and I don’t think anyone has all the answers. But in the interests of SCIENCE, here’s my initial hot takes on the FREAKZ movement system…
Terrain Layout Is Covered
Measureless movement games are even more dependant on terrain layout than regular minis games, so its great to see Michael spend a half page on just placing terrain. His core instruction, “make sure there are no big open gaps on the board”, is clarified with “make sure that you can’t draw a more than about 6″ long straight horizontal line anywhere on the board without hitting something”. Now, that’s a FUCK-TON of measuring during setup, and it effectively moves all the movement measurement to the setup phase, which is interesting. It feels to me like the game is sort of asking you to measure all possible movements in the game up front, before you know if you’ll need them, rather than measuring ‘on demand’ like a normal system, which seems inefficient. Of course, you could just say “don’t sweat the details, man” but then we edge closer and closer to just playing with toys (in a literal sense), and moving things wherever we like.
Clear Intent
The statement of intent for the movement system is really clear: he imagines you moving from one piece of cover to another. I like that it either costs you your movement action to hop through a terrain barrier if its over half your height, or its free to move through, if its half or less. That’s good. Worth saying “height” isn’t a stat, so you’ll want to use miniatures that are standing up, as a model in a low superhero stance isn’t going to be able to make it through terrain for free. (Could he not have just said “under 1″ tall”?).
No Moving Through “Gaps”
He adds a weird rule where if you would move between a gap (of an unspecified width) between two bits of cover, you have to stop or pick one of the bits of cover to move to. This seems EXTREMELY open for unintentional feel-bad moments, as its an honesty system that essentially asks me to compromise my game in the name of “playing in the spirit”. I don’t like this rule on paper, but maybe in play it’s cleaner than I’m imagining.
Minor Adjustments
Before or after your “move”, you can slide the model to any position that is still touching the area covered by its base (so, effectively 1″, but eyeballed) or you can snap to a “corner” of a terrain piece, as long as that terrain piece is “within a couple of inches” (but no measuring, yo, that’s a dick move 😉 ). That seems like a fine implementation of “let’s stay loose here” as otherwise the straight-line movement can be very geometric and precise, which isn’t the design goal here.
WEAPONS HAVE RANGES!!!!
This really surprised me. Also, he’s very clear that pre-measuring is IN. Also, EVERY model gets one of three basic ranged weapons for free. Without playing the game, it seems to me that this essentially undermines the whole measureless nature of the movement system, effectively inverted it to be “measure the zone that emanates from my intended target with a radium equal to the range of my gun, and then move to a point that lies within that radius which I have a path to“. Seems so weird. If we have tons of movement blocking terrain such that we are allowing ourselves infinite movement, why on earth couldn’t we have infinite ranged guns? It’s like people move faster than bullets in this game… both the cinema and the gameplay impacts seem real screwy here.
My take aways…
This system misses on measureless movement in a couple of important ways, but it’s really strong in its presentation and I think that will ensure (most) players have a perfectly good time here.
In theory, I don’t mind effectively shifting the measurement of movement to the set-up phase, that’s a sort of ‘set it and forget it’ approach that bears more exploration. I think the inclusion of measured ranged attacks undermines the measureless nature of the movement system, and potentially the core design intent of the game (but I’d need to play it to see).
I think this system is going to work fine with most players, and fail hard with a subset. I don’t think it delivers on the dream of a measureless miniatures game, but it’s a solid contribution in the conversation, and I’m happy to see it.
You can pick up my new textbook, The Fundamentals of Tabletop Miniatures Games Design, today by clicking this link.