War. War never changes. Except it kind of does, because expanding out from Fallout: Factions – ‘Battle For Nuka-World’ come the Fallout: Factions Core Rules from Modiphius, promising the same tight, fast gameplay with a whole lot more freedom to explore the wasteland.
Before diving in, thank you to Modiphius for sending this out for review. Some of the rules here were written by Goonhammer author Evie “Lupe” Moriarty, though they had no input on this review.
As part of our preview access to these rules Modiphius hosted Goonhammer writers at their studio for the day, including providing refreshments and meals for the group. We had a great time getting to grips with the gangs and ruleset, so big thanks to the folks at Modiphius for making it happen!
If you’re a Fallout tabletop fan, you’ll already have heard of Modiphius’s two major Fallout games – Wasteland Warfare, a tabletop minis RPG, and Fallout: Factions, a tight skirmish game experience. Fallout: Factions was initially released early last year, themed around Fallout 4’s Nuka-World expansion. It’s a great game and good fun, but the focus on Nuka-World might have left you a bit puzzled. If so, never fear! Fallout: Factions released as a core book contains all the rules, campaign structure and crew lists to get playing all over the post-apocalypse with a wide variety of gangs. If you didn’t catch Factions in its Nuka-World form, here’s the start point. In this review we’ll treat this release as a new game, looking at the core rules and crew lists, with an overview of campaign play following on Monday.
The core book – to us at least – marks Fallout: Factions arriving as a full on game. It’s got everything you’ll need (bar some tokens and minis) to get playing Factions, covering a rulebook with clear, fast and satisfying gameplay, extensive campaign options and lists for four iconic crews – Brotherhood of Steel, Raiders, Survivors and Super Mutants.
You can see the clear purpose of the new release – a broader and more comprehensive offer than Nuka-World, retaining the same fast and furious gameplay. Compared to Wasteland Warfare, Factions is a tighter, potentially more competitive experience, with a robust and interesting campaign system.
How It Plays
At heart, Factions is a Skirmish game similar in scale to games like Kill Team & Stargrave with scenarios that can be over in as little as four or five rounds of play. It’s a lethal, fast-paced experience that can see you get a couple of games in over a few hours, but none of that speed comes at the cost of interesting decisions or gameplay mechanics. It’s a stripped down, lean and honed gaming experience, clearly taking a lot of good ideas from other systems (and more importantly avoiding some of the bad ideas) to provide a really focused, very enjoyable play experience. It’s simple things like dice mechanics, roll-under tests or alternating interactions that form the base layer, keeping both you and your opponent engaged as you pass turns back to one another like a game of speed chess.
Dice resolution is easy, fast and Fallout-y: A simple D10 dice-pool system, with the major departure from your most common wargames being it relies on rolling-under rather than rolling-over. What you need to roll is determined by the model’s attributes, which is modelled after the S.P.E.C.I.A.L (Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence, Agility, Luck.) system we see featured in every Fallout game. Dice pools let you stack odds in your favour and the luck system adds an easy to interpret layer of spike and critical effects to melee and shooting. It all feels very Fallout, where taking a moment to assess and stack your odds hearkens back to turn based combat or pausing in VATS to assess which blowfly head you want to snipe off first.
Alternating activations and the action system keeps play moving while very clearly signalling the board state at every turn. That’s important for a couple of reasons – gameplay is always clean and simple to resolve, even with complex and spiralling risk/rewards, it provides a huge range of tactical options to consider and makes the game inherently suitable for competitive play. Knowing that every model on the table can take the same defined set of actions, and when they can take them adds a huge layer of tactical depth to everything from activation to melee.
Moment to moment depth and gameplay interest comes from that basic structure. A model can, for example, Shoot, and then pass. Your opponent knows your model is in an advantageous position and might commit both actions from one of their activations to try and stop you from taking advantage of your second. It’s a wonderful little system of back and forth that makes the game feel a lot more fast-paced than some other skirmish games out there.
Everything is streamlined for speed while retaining Fallout flavour. You’re rarely, if ever, doing more than simple addition and subtraction from your dice pools while in the thick of it. Your models come with a full array of S.P.E.C.I.A.L stats but honestly you’ll remember what their core stat is after a few games, and when one of their other stats does come up for something you’ll have the unit card ready at a glance. Weapons have a list of defined effects and clearly signal which attributes they key off. Chems (yes, you can indeed dose yourself up with Psycho) and Perks add abilities and additional complexity, but share names (delightfully) with their video game equivalents, so while a note card is handy, even the most complex effects are two to three sentences.
With a little bit of coaching, we managed to pick up the game from practically zero knowledge and get close to three (Lenoon: Four over here!) games finished in just under a few hours. That speed of play carries over to the writing too. If you’re playing stand alone games you’ll find everything you need within 20 pages (which also include a lot of art – very nicely illustrated book, this!), with well indexed weapon and perk lists backing you up.
Stand alone games are possible, fun and well worth it, but the clear meat of this release is campaign play – if you’re interested, and you should be – please see our campaign review on Monday. On its own, the core rulebook doesn’t provide you any rules for matched tournament play, and operates on the idea that you will be forming, or joining, a group to go play a campaign with. Thankfully, the tournament pack accompanying the release will be out soon – watch this space!
Factions of Fallout
So that’s how it plays, but who are you playing here? Factions provides options for four crews, with a note that the game is fully compatible with the three from the Nuka-World starter set. With some official-but-not-for-tournaments Wild Wasteland crews, Factions releases into the world with nine options, each providing substantially different gameplay and campaign experiences. Crew lists give you options for champions and grunts with defined gear lists, keeping options flexible but relatively straightforward. Gear and stats do most of the heavy lifting, with ploys (one use in-game effects) adding additional differentiation between crew types.
Nuka-World Gangs
The tyrants of Nuka-World, you can find their rules in the Welcome to Nuka-World starter set, with The Pack and The Operators included in the box.
The Operators: Holding themselves to a higher standard than their peers, the Operators are consummate professional criminals with their fingers in gun-running, drug-dealing and contract killing. The Operators prefer to keep their targets at arm’s length, specialising on ranged combat and focus-firing targets down.
The Pack: Savage meatheads with a survival-of-the-fittest creed, The Pack only respect strength and consider themselves the strongest around. The Pack love to get stuck in hand-to-hand, with strong melee chops and some dangerous movement tricks for getting in punching range.
The Disciples: Demented thrill-killers who hold their own gratification over everything else, The Disciples won’t just murder you, they’ll make a spectacle of it first. Generalist all-rounders, The Disciples may not hit as hard as their competitors but they have a plethora of crowd control tricks to keep the prey pinned down and helpless as they close in for the kill
Main Rulebook Factions
Brotherhood of Steel: Everyone’s favourite increasingly fascistic poster-boys. The Brotherhood are an order of techno-knights with a remit to scour the Wastelands for technological remnants of the pre-War world, hoarding high tech gizmos and purging mutated threats. On the tabletop they’re functionally Bretonnia with lasers, with power-armoured Knights leading the charge supported by far squishier Aspirants and Scribes.
Super Mutants: Hulking ogre-like creatures spawned from the demented dream of creating American super-soldiers, Super Mutants consider themselves the next stage of human evolution and are more than happy to prove that point through excessive violence. The second of Factions’ elite crews, Super Mutants are incredibly resilient melee brawlers, while they’ll almost always be outnumbered they’ll rarely be out-muscled with the average Super Mutant easily worth twice a regular human jobber and able to shrug off way more punishment.
Survivors: Survivors are people who keep the candle of civilisation burning, no matter how dim it gets, and band together when times are tough. They are as varied as the things that would threaten them: roaming nomads who look out for each other, townsfolk looking to protect their settlement, or a tribe who just want to secure peace in their homelands. Survivors synergise with Perks to punch above the individual weight class of the crew’s members and focus on spreading the burden with their crew-wide innate Survivalist Perk. Other crews will learn to be wary of your revenge-based Ploy to make a brutal counter-strike on the offending model who took down one of their own.
Wasteland Raiders: Sadistic hedonists, crazed killers, and immoral opportunists who roam the Wasteland. They come in all sorts of flavours, and all of them are bad – slaver gangs, cutthroat highwaymen, and chem-fiends are just a few. Raiders come in numbers, packed to the gills with chems, and are willing to sacrifice their pawns in chem-induced frenzies of ultraviolence. They hit hard, go down fast, and will leave you reeling while the gang-bosses stroll in after to clean up.
Wild Wasteland Factions
The weirdest and wackiest threats the Wasteland can throw at you, Wild Wasteland crews are not intended for competitive play and are illegal for use in Tournament settings for their unique rules and wacky playstyles.
Cult of the Mothman: Once the stuff of folk legends. It turns out the Mothman is real, and strong and your god. At least his Cultists think so, and woe betide any heretic who tells them otherwise. The Mothcult are a mid-range gang built around their unique Ritual mechanic, able to sacrifice the potential damage from their Luck bonuses to advance their summoning ritual. Once it reaches its peak the Cult can summon The Mothman, a powerful monster unit that can either supercharge His cultists or rain some supersonic judgement on the unbelievers.
Zetan Invaders: Turns out we had a reason to keep watching the skies. The Zetans are insidious extraterrestrials after our delicious brainwaves, who’ve emerged from the shadows to pick at Earth’s irradiated corpse. Zetans are a short-ranged shooting gang with some uniquely dangerous weapons and units, with the Zetan Commander as one of the singular most deadly units in the game, while the Flatwoods Monster can mesmerize foolish Earthlings into turning their guns on each other.
What We Really Liked
There’s a lot in Factions that works very well. The basic gameplay loop – alternate activations, simple to resolve actions – feels fantastic. You know what your options are, you have a good grasp on what you’re likely to achieve, you can decide and let the dice do the talking. Action economy is tight and interesting, weapons and critical effects manage to balance being varied and impactful without being overly complex or slow to resolve. When the main thing we’re saying we like is “playing the game”, then something has gone right in the design process.
That loop is ably assisted by the clarity of the book layout and clear technical rules writing. This is a well produced ruleset that does the job without a lot of fuss or needing to flip back and forth. I wish every ruleset I read was as nicely done, to be honest. Would solve a lot of problems.
If I had to guess, “Satisfying depth while keeping gameplay simple” is probably written in ten foot high letters inside Modiphius HQ, because that idea runs throughout everything in the book. Weapons are a great example, with a simple structure of varied rules keying off S.P.E.C.I.A.L and the D10 probability space. It works, it’s fun and it’s definitely Fallout.
What’s Not So Good
It’s not a perfect set of rules (what is?), and there are a few things worth mentioning that are otherwise tiny blowflies in the dubiously-procured-ghoul-ointment.
First off, loadouts for your gangers are quite restricted, particularly at crew start. There’s definitely a balance and complexity equation here where providing rules for fifty different loadouts for a Brotherhood Paladin, for example, would be a pain in the arse, but it can lead to some feels bad moments. There’s several weapon options/loadouts in the currently available plastic kits that are designed for Wasteland Warfare rather than Factions, making it way too easy to stumble into accidentally building an illegally kitted out crew.
Wasteland Warfare has a huge and intimidating (and more or less comprehensive) range of miniatures available – and while Modiphius have made increasing amounts of the Wasteland Warfare range playable in Factions in some way or the other (as Wild Wasteland gangs, Companions or NPC enemies for special scenarios), there’s still quite a missing chunk of stuff players might be expecting from a Fallout game despite the minis being available. That’s not a terrible thing, but it feels like the game is 90% there – more coming, a bit of a DLC model that might not be the best thing to take from the games.
Depending on your Fallout (Lenoon: It’s New Vegas, isn’t it?), the focus of this book might resonate differently – it’s very much focused at this stage in Fallout 4 & 76. That isn’t to say the book is devoid of reference to New Vegas, the Pitt, or the Fiends and all that other good stuff. The people who wrote this book clearly know the lore of the franchise well – perhaps we just have to wait.
Why Play Fallout Factions?
We can cut a conclusion short by saying Fallout: Factions is definitely worth your time. It’s a fantastically fun game you could play in short bursts, long campaigns, event days (hint hint, come play with us) or whenever else you want to take a load of Jet and kick a raider in the face. You are going to have a huge amount of fun with the basic mechanics, streamlined, efficient and flavoursome with enough crunch to dive into in list and theorybuilding. An hour or two (at most) playing a one off game is never going to feel like a waste of time and you’ll always enjoy fishing for lucky hits and rummaging for chems. It’s a game where every decision matters, has important effects and where systems mastery will really reward you. Whether one off or in a campaign, try it out because war does change: it gets much more fun.
If you want to come play Fallout Factions with us, you can! Check out the upcoming March 2025 Goonhammer Open UK, grab tickets and you can be crowned Goonhammer’s first Sole Survivor.
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