What can I say about Gregor Hutton’s space-war masterpiece 3:16 : Carnage Among the Stars (96-page black-and-white softcover, 8.5″ x 5.5″, $20) that hasn’t already been said by its adoring fan community? Robin Laws, for example, says it “out-Verhoevens Verhoeven,” which is if anything an understatement, given that 3:16 is actually fun and playable, as compared to Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers clanker. What Hutton’s game does do is present a superb piece of battle-ready game design, a brilliant evocation of genre, as much satire as you want to chew on, and a fine lesson in minimalism, all at once.
Character creation is simplicity itself: you have two stats (Fighting Ability and Non-Fighting Ability), which drive your Rank, which sets your basic loadout. Given that 3:16 is a game of interplanetary amphibious infantry warfare (there’s that Starship Troopers reference), the speed of chargen comes in handy when you have to build replacements. Because it’s brutal, tactical, and not a little bit cynical all at once (there’s that genre evocation), your characters may die through no fault of their own, through their own stupid fault, or thanks to their officers’ incompetence. You feel it when they do, though; each character has Strengths and Weaknesses revealed in flashbacks, aimed to reduce the GM’s threat pool for each planetary invasion. (Note how all of this is tying together.) That’s right; as in Agon, the GM has a “pain budget,” and if the troopers of the 3:16th can dish out more pain than they absorb, they win!
A clever, old-school style planet generation system helps the GM build worlds, vicious aliens, and missions in a hurry, varying the rules just enough to keep everything tactically interesting, but never slowing down the game or hampering the players. The characters are plenty hampered, but if they can just rack up more kills than the next squaddie, they’ll get promoted … just in time for the next mission. The rules hit a perfect sweet spot, where there are just enough tactical options to keep everyone guessing and surprised (happily or not), but not enough to drown players in options or soak up game time. (And lots and lots of play examples cut the learning curve down still farther.) Extended play can aim toward satire, as the 3:16th uses ever more comically vast weaponry on their missions of pre-emptive genocide, or simply provide a soap-operatic extension of adrenaline and exploding aliens.
This simplicity and speed make 3:16 an ideal “not everyone can show up tonight” game, while the themes and mechanics allow a surprising amount of meat and depth to come off the bone. It can be as dark, or as simple, as you’d like to make it — and if you want to play out Starship Troopers (either version), you can do it as fast and fatal as the M.I. themselves.
