Razor’s Edge: The Falklands War 1982 - Designer Diary #2
“Like Next War in scope, and Littoral Commander in style.”
An extremely short elevator pitch I have come up with to describe Razor’s Edge is that it’s like Next War in scope, and Littoral Commander in style.
Razor’s Edge plays quicker than Next War, and eschews the proceduralness of that system. The Next War comparison applies though to the integrated combined arms / multi-domain campaign elements of both games. I consider Razor’s Edge as a ‘system’, like Next War.
The Littoral Commander comparison references the game’s dynamic approach to activation, and its streamlined D20-based combat resolution system. Like Littoral Commander, you do not need to reference combat results tables in Razor’s Edge.
These comparisons only go so far though, and are only helpful if you are familiar with these other games.
So let’s delve into the details a bit for two core mechanics of Razor’s Edge: activations and tests.
A lot can happen in four days…
Each Turn in Razor’s Edge represents four days of the campaign. A lot can happen in four days. In the air war, each side could have flown upwards of 100 sorties. A Task Force or nuclear submarine could have circled the entire length of the Total Exclusion Zone. A battalion of troops could have - and virtually did - yomp the more than 50 miles between San Carlos and Port Stanley.
Notwithstanding what you can achieve when you are acting, the game applies a spectrum of rigidity to operations - in the form of activation limits - that tracks to the domain type.
What do I mean?
First, let’s take a broad look at what was possible, by domain, in the campaign:
Launching an air strike, perhaps as a result of new intel, could occur quickly. A max of six hours from start to finish.
Tasking a group of ships to conduct anti-submarine warfare took more time. It's highly contingent, but let's say 12 hours.
Conducting a ground assault… you are more in the 36-48 hour range. And that’s before properly addressing the post-battle impact of casualties and ammunition expenditure.
Ergo, if we put aside the impact of foul weather on operations, over a four day period British and Argentine commanders had a lot of optionality with the air forces, and little with their ground forces. Naval forces fell somewhere in between.
What that means in game terms is that, in a Turn, there’s no mechanical limit on the number of times you can activate your air force*. You can activate your naval task forces four times each. Nuclear submarines can activate three times. Diesel submarines twice. And land and Special Forces just once.
*If this sounds crazy, do not fear. Each time an Air Unit activates it suffers attrition, and at a certain point this will force a side to cease air operations.
After a side has completed an Activation, the other side gets to complete an Activation. This goes back and forth until either both sides have nothing left to activate or both sides have consecutively passed.
It’s a dynamic system that presents some wonderful dilemmas around prioritisation, timing, and layering of effects. Very ‘multi-domain’.
Hold on, are we playing D&D here?
I enjoy roleplay games and often discover they have concepts and mechanics that can cross-over well to board games. D&D is not my favourite RPG by any stretch, but its requirement to meet a target number using a D20, with a bad outcome for a ‘critical failure’ roll, was one that I realised could work well in Razor’s Edge.
Specifically, Razor’s Edge uses a D20 system to resolve ‘tests’. A test is required to detect an enemy task force, conduct a SOF raid, intercept an enemy strike, and more. Most types of Operation require a test to be successful.
The mechanic is simple. Each unit has one or more bespoke ‘Base Ratings’; for example a submarine has anti-ship, anti-submarine, surface detect and submarine detect ratings; a Land Unit has a combat rating.
This base rating can be modified by environmental factors, for example the Weather or if the target is undetected. The modified rating is called the ‘Target Rating’. The acting player must roll a D20 and achieve a result equal to or less than the Target Rating.
If they do the operation is successful. This may mean, for example, a ship in a Task Force is hit by an Exocet from an Air Strike Operation, or an Argentine Air Base is successfully raided by British special forces.
If the roll is higher than the Target Rating, the operation has been unsuccessful. Normally, there’s no further consequence. However, if the roll was a natural ‘20’, the operation has suffered a Critical Failure. Critical failures were unfortunately rather common in the foul environment of the South Atlantic. In game terms, it can mean a ship taking minor damage, a submarine losing an activation, or a special forces unit being lost for two turns.
The D20 test mechanic has the benefit of being both simple to execute - all the information is in front of the players with no table or chart required - and in creating a wonderful emergent narrative.
In the next Designer Diary I will look at the different types of Operations that can be performed in the game.
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