Review of MAJESTIC-13

 

I’ve completed reading the 144 pages of the MAJESTIC 13 wargame pdf, and this is my summary review. MAJESTIC 13 was written by Adam Loper and Vincent Venturella of Snarling Badger Studios.  Previous offerings by the authors include Reign in Hell and Space Station Zero. Just by reading through it, MAJESTIC 13 comes across as a very focused, very clear wargame. 

Your average randomly generated, solo, vs or coop skirmish game of MAJESTIC 13 consists of each player fielding a team of 5 individuals who are armed to take down one of 26 different alien variants. Since your team of 5 gangs up on an alien, each member of your team can only activate ONCE per combat round, while the alien can activate up to 3 times per combat round.

MAJESTIC 13's inception was not with Roswell, but with an earlier alien crashlanding which occurred in 1941 Cape Girardeau, Missouri. Because the military was busy with a World War at the time, 13 civilian factions were founded that reverse engineered weapons from alien tech and currently sponsor MAJESTIC 13 teams. Your team of 5 can be from one of the 13 factions. These factions draw their origins from what group of people discovered the alien who crash-landed in 1941 because he was trying to escape from a greater more dangerous invading alien power called simply "The FORCE". It was also found that this “naturalized” alien can hybridize with humans, so the children of that union are where one of the 13 factions gets its identity (The Naturalized).

The MAJESTIC 13 Factions range from a US government psychic research organization (Psight-Ops) to reverse engineered weapons wielding tech-bros (Silicon Syndicate) to an in-universe version of Anonymous with reasons and resource to fight the alien menace (Dispersed).  

In addition to choosing a faction, your unit of five gets to choose an Advantage to further distinguish the team. Your team could be well connected and get bonuses on the post-game Bureaucracy roll, or they could have additional weapons and training, or be the elite of humanity with chemical enhancements, psionics or skin enhanced with alien technology.  

Along with a faction and advantage, your team also gets to chose a base which can be expanded with new suites of bonuses (Upgrades) available to requisition after your team has undergone a mission in the field. Base building is not just stacking bonuses though. As your team becomes more veteran, aliens from FORCE can and will assault your base, so choose your expansions wisely!

Mission Flow and Random Generation

Next up is the Mission Flow for a typical randomly generated MAJESTIC 13 game. 

All randomly generated missions last five turns of play. Meaning you and your MAJESTIC 13 team of five have five turns and up to five activations (per unit) total to annihilate the alien menace. 

Creating the mission calls for 7 rolls, usually randomized on a provided table. You will roll for Geography, Terrain, Enemy, Bureaucracy (not to be confused with the post-mission Bureaucracy roll), and Secondary Objective.  Once you have completed the Team and Enemy Setup phases, you will roll for FUBAR events and may make a Call for Aid roll.  All these rolls will be detailed below.

In the Geography roll the result can be either Wilderness or Urban. Both options change the FUBAR and the Call for Aid rolls to a small degree. 

The Terrain roll is informed by the Geography roll. There are random tables provided for generating quarters of the board for both Wilderness and Urban areas.  The Urban random table will generate an area that is denser than the Wilderness random table, some of the time.  

In the Enemy roll, you determine which of the 26 unique alien enemies detailed in the book you are fighting to the death. 

The Bureaucracy roll section states, “A great plan never survives contact with the enemy; most of the time it will never even make it to the battlefield.”  MAJESTIC 13 is a decentralized, bureaucratic organization where miscommunication, missing intelligence and slow responses can affect the combat situation in the field. Generally, a Bureaucracy roll (2d20) result is a hinderance to alien killing operations but occasionally it can be a benefit. 

The Secondary Objectives roll are where the factions in MAJESTIC 13 have individual priorities that rear their ugly heads. This is a 1d6 roll that can require the MAJESTIC 13 team to scout the field or collect specific items. Your squad may get additional benefits from completing Secondary Objectives.   

At this point the players are instructed to complete the Team and Enemy Setup phases. 

Next, during play, make a FUBAR roll. A FUBAR roll occurs at the start of each round. This roll is the chance that something will go very wrong. A FUBAR roll is initially an escalating roll. Specifically, at the start of every turn roll a 1d6 and add the turn’s number to the dice’s rolled value. If the result is a 6 or higher, then roll 1d20 for a FUBAR Event.  There is however the rare chance (19-20 on a FUBAR Event roll) that the player gets a benefit of Long-Range Support, i.e., a sniper fires from offscreen on one of your non-Hidden targets. 

The Call for Aid is an optional roll where the player contacts their team’s faction. A team may spend an action during their activation to attempt a Call for Aid.  The Call for Aid roll is similar to the FUBAR roll.  The roll is a 1d6 modified positively by the number of turns the current turn is in. If the Call for Aid roll is successful (i.e., 6 or higher), you may choose one of the Call for Aid listed effects to occur immediately.  These effects include: Drone Strike, Medical Drop, Robotic Back-Up, or Evacuation. 

After achieving certain ratings (i.e., experience, detailed below in Post-Game Awards) by completing randomized missions, your team’s subsequent mission will be a bespoke Special Mission. This reflects FORCE taking note of your team in increasingly dangerous ways.  These Special Missions are often ambushes, surprise scenarios or feature overwhelming forces that your team must survive through.  The enemies your team faces in Special Missions are members of FORCE and yes, they are tough, for they include special tweaks to their enemy AI. 

During missions, combat and other checks are made by rolling d20. Damage usually utilizes d6s. Of the six stats, two of them, Dexterity and Fortitude, can be used to shake off conditions that aliens can apply like Poisoned, Stunned, Restrained and Blinded.

Post-Game Processes

After your Mission, whether it is randomly generated or scripted from the MAJESTIC 13 book, there are four steps, called collectively the Post-Game Processes, you must undergo. 

The Post-Game Processes consist of the following steps: Injuries, Death and Cloning; Advancement; Awards; and Bureaucracy (not to be confused with the Bureaucracy roll made when creating a mission from random tables as described above). 

The first step after your mission, win or lose, is to catalogue injuries and deaths; and then go to the cloning vats if any member of your team has perished. 

If any member of your team has been put Out of Action and Removed from Play, roll 3d6 on the Injury and Death Effect table. The result of that table can give your unit a Permanent Injury, an All Clear, an alien Symbiote, Death or something far worse. 

If any of your team is Dead, you can bring them back (with full health and without a scratch or sort-of-kinda ok) with a successful 2d6 roll at the Cloning Results table. 

The second step in the Post-Game is processing an unit’s individual experience gains and Advancing any appropriate team member. 

The third step is to apply Awards to the team.  This is where your team increases it’s Rating that can trigger Special Missions. The Team’s Rating is essentially it’s experience level. A Team Rating of 10 or higher signifies that the team is in “Phase 2” which increases the quality of gear the team members can select AND increase the lethality and abilities of the random aliens the team will fight.  

At the end of the Awards phase, your team may requisition up to two additional pieces of equipment and one base upgrade. 

Step 4 is called Bureaucracy but I think it should have been renamed “Requisition” for clarity.  The Bureaucracy roll in this phase is 1d6 plus up to four +1 modifiers. For each six or higher your roll for each piece of equipment you requested in the previous Awards step, you get one of the items you have requested on your list. To acquire a base upgrade requested, the roll must be 5 or higher. 

Comparison to Other Wargames

After my readthrough of MAJESTIC 13, I have to say I like the idea and simplicity of sticking to 5 men teams. Upon reflection, however, on a different X-COM-like wargame called Insurgent Earth, I like the campaign system and survival mechanics featured in that product as well.  Overall, I’ve concluded both products are worth owning because they tackle similar core themes with great diversity in mechanics and systems. 

Insurgent Earth is a wargame written by Patrick Todoroff of Zona Alfa, Exploit Zero, and Nightwatch wargames fame. I’ve read and played Zona Alfa; a character creation recommendation and after-action report start here.

Unsurprisingly, Zona Alfa and Insurgent Earth share a degree of game design DNA, for example with grenade rules and stats, but for the large part Insurgent Earth has a significant fraction of new mechanics specifically, with the campaign system. 

In Insurgent Earth, alien fighters are partisans, not funded by mysterious and bureaucratic factions like in MAJESTIC 13. As such, in Insurgent Earth players need to find salvage like food, medical, chemical and electronic components to feed or supply their fighters with wartime gear.  The Insurgent Earth salvage system is reminiscent of finding necessary supplies for your zombie fighters in Last Days. 

Layered on top of the salvage system, is the ability to craft and upgrade your alien fighter’s gear with salvaged elements (for mundane but powerful equipment) and extracted Xeno-Tech to enhance your weapons and armor.  This campaign style allocation of resources, makes Insurgent Earth feel (at least according to my reading) like much more of a scrounging skirmish firefight than MAJESTIC 13’s roll and hope for the best, request for resources Bureaucracy rolls in the Post Game.  

I must remark though, that I am impressed by what MAJESTIC 13 brings to the table. The sheer variety of alien enemies (26, wow) and the number of scripted missions (6) adds a lot of diversity to the randomly generated conflicts. 

I also think that MAJESTIC 13’s decision to allow the player to clone dead team members was a good one because, as the book says, missions are supposed to be lethal and exciting.  Constantly having to bring up new squad members (like in the XCOM video games) adds a treadmill to the action which could make the whole mission cycle feel like a slog.  I am glad the Designer Notes state that getting team members “back on the field for the next mission” was a design goal because it eliminates the possibility of that slog. 

Lastly, I really enjoyed the short fiction (less than a page!) intro story for MAJESTIC 13. It could have been ripped from the pages of Delta Green, particularly the ending.  Nice job, Adam Loper and Vincent Venturella.