2020 Top 10 Countdown of solo skirmish games #4

#4 TERMINATOR GENISYS: RISE OF THE RESISTANCE MINIATURES GAME

This game deserves the award for longest game title. Henceforth to be known as Terminator Genisys ROTRMG. Or ROTR for short.

I only got it because Warlord was literally throwing it away at one of their Black Friday sales. £10 for the starter!!!! I think the original price was north of £50. And the neoprene mats were so ridiculously cheap at £5 each that I bought two of them (down from.... £20-ish?).

Then the game languished in my Pile of Unplayed Games for 1+ years until COVID-19 hit and I was separated from most of my minis. That's when I hauled it out to give the game a try and boy was I surprised.

The game is fast, fun and furious. Clean, elegant rules that get out of the way of gameplay and you only need a card to refer to troop and weapon stats (that become second nature if you're playing with just the core set anyway). Assymetric forces. Objective-based missions. Small forces. Just make sure to download the Terminator AI chart from River Horse and you're good to go.

The Terminators don't benefit from cover as they are relentless killing machines that can take quite an effort to take them down, so when you do (as the Resistance) you really want to punch the air and cheer. The Resistance needs to dodge from cover to cover, so making sure you have lots of scatter amidst all the rubble and ruins is important.

The only slight down side is there can be a bit of dice rolling involved that harkens back to WH40K's "roll to hit, roll to damage, roll to save" that's only mitigated because there's only 2 dice involved instead of bucketsful of them. The other downer is trying to find suitable proxies for Resistance heavy weapons troopers since the official ones are either OOP or command a ridiculous price ($80) on eBay.

Still, I like the game enough I got the large Pegasus Hunter Killer drone off eBay, the Terminator Genisys board game (for more units) and I'm looking for a cheap(ish) Abrams M1 for larger points games on a 3'x3' table instead of the default nearly 2'x3'.

Recommended and deserves its #4 ranking for me.