Xenos Rampant: Science Fiction Wargame Battles

Product Information

On top of those 13 basic unit types, there are 30 additional rules for infantry, 18 for vehicles and 35 “Xenos rules” representing weird and wonderful abilities.

We are delighted to announce that we’ve signed a contract with Osprey Publishing to produce the next book in the Rampant wargaming series: Xenos Rampant. Mitch pitted his IG against some rebel human types that I had from way back when since we played Future Wars and its Pulp campaign. He’s very very tough, so gets Super Heavy Armour, and he’s also very good in melee with Assault Doctrine, while his array of guns give him Anti Tank to boot. David’s commander rolled the “Unpredictable” trait and I did the “Extreme Disciplinarian” aggressive trait.Scenarios that require capture of objectives work better as your force needs to be more balanced, has to move rather than shoot and so for me results in a more balanced game. Lion Rampant looks really nice and it is actually surprisingly rare to have another solid historical rule set that looks really good.

The use of ranged weapons was a bit frustrating for me, since to-hit values are often quite high and the dice gods were not in my favor.

My ‘compact’ warband consisted of a couple of necromancers, forty cultists, and several dozen undead. I played a classic fantasy setup with a bunch of dwarves versus goblins with some trolls mixed in and they didn’t feel like dwarves or goblins. And what always happens with this sort of ruleset, and I bet it happens in Xenos Rampant as well, in my experience there’s always a narrative that unfolds. You can learn Xenos Rampant in ten minutes, but mastering it and working with the activation system will take a gratifying amount of concentration and effort.

A large part of my miniature collection, armed with laser rifles and plasma guns, started to feel neglected, so I began to develop a ruleset that would eventually become Xenos Rampant – a science fiction modification of Dragon Rampant. You can design virtually anything you want from these – and the same goes for the three types of vehicle and the 18 vehicle options. It’s obviously a fantastic narrative opportunity to have the means to put whatever you want onto the field and have it backed with rules, but it’s also a great mechanical one. That kind of idea where you look at the battlefield and have an idea of what you can do instinctively gives a lot of depth.Everything’s like that, it’s deep enough to provide some challenge on the tabletop but it’s not over complicated or anything like that. Overall for me, it’s the kind of system where I want to sit down and play with a group of whatever models from a kind of vague mediaeval period.