Mail Room: Modern War

Where did this game come from? Wow, this one is amazing, a clear S-Tier military game. Even if you just like looking at pictures of guns, military systems, and tanks this one is a keeper as a reference manual. Want to know more about those pictures of the knocked-out tanks in Ukraine? This is your game.

Want to play a marksman in a marine squad sent to clear a building from Central-Asian rebel mercenary snipers in a destroyed eastern European city under siege? This is your game.

It is a unique game because it assumes you take the roles of members of a modern military squad, and you play one member of it while the rest of the squad fights alongside you. So when your squad of marines gets pinned down in a gas station by mortar and small arms fire, you can play the marksman with the sniper rifle, pick off the mortar spotters harassing you, and move before an enemy drone homes in on your position and you get hit by missiles or artillery.

In short, you can play everything you see on the news and be a fictional hero in any war you can dream up or the ones you don't need to dream up and go on social media to check on.

The reference material in this book is incredible, with pictures of everything, stats, and you get much more here than a military weapons book you could get from Amazon. And you get to use all that cool stuff in battle, fire the ATGMs, use the rifles, launch the grenades, call in fire support, dodge the drones, and evac by chopper.

The rule system uses the Traveller-like OGL Cepheus system, and it is rules-light and blazingly fast.

The OGL by itself is incredible, and the fact creative people can use it to create games like this and share them with the world is an amazing thing. While the new Twilight:2000 game is a cool sort of dice-and-chart survival-focused experience with storytelling and NPC interaction, this is a much more real and immediate hit of military action roleplaying where you are sent in to get a job done and get out alive.

This game may hit a little too close to today for some, as you can watch a video on Twitter of a battle happening, and your games will be shockingly close to that experience. You can play "what if" scenarios where NATO goes into a hotspot, and squads are sent to grab objectives and complete missions. Again, if this gives you more worry and stress than interest, stick to more escapist games.

I grew up wargaming with my brother and loved military systems and history. This book and its supplements are a gold mine of great memories and fun data. My first reaction was this was a game that feels like a modern war roleplaying game version of the classic Squad Leader wargame - and that is a game I always wanted but never had.

I would love a WW2 version of this game done to the same level of detail. That would be another S-Tier game for me.

You layout a mission for a squad to complete, load up, insert into the LZ, and move to contact. You play one person in that squad and pick your role and position. Then, things go wrong. You adapt and overcome. And your fate lies in the dice and the actions you take.

Epic.