2020 Top 10 Countdown of solo skirmish games #3

#3 HARDWIRED CYBERPUNK ESPIONAGE AND MAYHEM

(Now known as EXPLOIT ZERO : CYBERPUNK ESPIONAGE AND MAYHEM thanks to some silly copyright IP thing.)

I love the whole cyberpunk genre so having a simple (but not simplistic) minis agnostic ruleset for cyberpunk skirmishing is really a match made in heaven for me.

Thankfully I have lots of suitable minis, especially the minis from MERCS Recon that can be used as OpFor.

The game plays smoothly, and uses several polyhedral dice to measure the effectiveness of models. The main Agent team gets d10, d8 and d6 dice that can be used for 3 actions. It illustrates the more actions you take, the less effective you are (within a given time frame). Really simple and elegant without needing lots of complicated rules. The OpFor get various dice types (only 1 type per OpFor level, though) to show that higher level OpFor are more effective as the Level 1 OpFor only get d6s. 

The game emphasises storytelling over tournament play, so it's more suited for casual gaming with its objective based missions. The Tsim Tsa Tsui supplement adds more skills and Agent types for you to play with, including tougher OpFor. Actually, the original rules are open ended enough for you to hack with your own rules, but having something official and already written is a lot simpler and obviates a lot of DIY rules that I was going to implement anyway.

2 cheap Infinity terrain packs that are close to 3x3 gives you enough terrain to play (plus some scatter). 

As a cheap and low cost method of getting into solo cyberpunk (or near-future) solo skirmish gaming, Hardwired Cyberpunk deserves its #3 rank (for me, needless to say).