Deadly Woman Yie: Pilot Episode (Warfighter: Shadow War)

 I've been playing a bit of Warfighter: Shadow War lately to try to get my head around the night rules. They are not that difficult, but they require you to track more things and it feels like my brain is ossifying lately. I mentioned the game to my poor, long-suffering friend Steve, because I thought it was quite cool tooling around in an SAS Land Rover with the Desert Storm: Operation Granby mission pack, as I have done for the last few games. His reluctance to play a Gulf War themed game is understandable, and I share it to some extent, but I got carried away with Land Rovers. So, I have decided to start a new military-themed K-drama to try to persuade him that Warfighter has merit and could be something we play at some point. I know he likes K-dramas.

Shadow War does not include a lot of player nations. Fortunately, it is 100% compatible with the main Warfighter game and the hostiles in the base game are North Korean. So, I grabbed the South Korea pack and set up a quick mission. Very quick, as it turned out. I picked the mission GO GO GO! because it is short but I did not expect it to be as short as it was. The mission card told me how many points I had. I then chose the objective which was to stop an escaping VIP by destroying his helicopter. After that, I picked the insertion and extraction method, in this case entrance and exit by Zodiac, with a view to what skills I would need for my soldier. I knew it would only be one soldier because 27 points does not buy you a lot, especially when you have to pay for night skills and gear.

Sergeant Yie is ready for action

The soldiers in the base game do not have Shadows skill or night vision goggles, which is the main difference between the two sets. Given that the game is about sneaking, I chose Shadows 8+ skill (the best you can get in the game) and a set of 3rd Gen Night Goggles for my soldier. I also picked out a suppressed K7 SMG and equipped it with 3 mags of heavy, subsonic ammo (Black Ammo: it makes less noise so you know it makes sense). Then I chose my soldier when I knew how many points I had left. Yie fit the bill nicely and there were a few points left over to buy a couple of grenades  in case things went south and some covert gear to improve her chances of things not going south.

Game setup. Dice tower to the right. My team at the bottom. Cards to draw at the top and the mission, objective, insertion and extraction cards on the game mat.

After that, it was time to see how the mission went. The chosen insertion method reduced the game length by two turns, so I would have to keep moving to succeed.

Deadly Woman Yie (Pilot episode)

Scene: A briefing room. An angry Major in army uniform is yelling at a young woman wearing the stripes of a sergeant.

"You're all we have, Sergeant Yie! If there were anyone else, I would use them! You're a maverick and a danger to all those around you! I don't even know how you have avoided being dismissed from the army so far! Well, don't mess this up! Your mission is to head to [REDACTED] Airfield and intercept General Vega M. Elk. We know he has been meeting with his North Korean counterpart to coordinate the activities of his Shadow Corps with their own actions to destabilise the Republic of Korea and our allies. GO THERE! GET HIM! AND DON'T MESS THIS UP!"

Spittle flew from Major E. Vent's mouth as he yelled this last. Yie was unmoved. She had heard it all before.

"Yes, Sir!" She affirmed and turned to go off and pack her gear, assuming that she was dismissed. Major Vent watched her back balefully.

Scene: A river bank. Text on the screen tells us this is [REDACTED], North Korea. A black rubber raiding craft approaches silently across the water. Understated music builds tension.

Sergeant Yie piloted her Zodiac into the reeds beside the river bank. She slipped stealthily over the side of the small boat into the shallow water and moved confidently but quietly forward. Ahead she could see the lights of a small airfield. She scanned the area carefully with her nightvision goggles, and spent a moment to consider the open field ahead of her. It was quiet. Too quiet. As she paused, hostiles approached.

 She had been right not to head out immediately. She sank back into the river bank and waited. The hostiles approached and she flipped on her goggles. It was a patrol of soldiers. They were sharing a cigarette and seemed oblivious to her presence. As she watched, they approached her position. She was ready to shoot if she had to, but she hoped they would pass her by ... for their sake.

Luckily for the hapless and careless soldiers, they just walked right past her. She moved out into the field, keeping low. Ahead she could see a black helicopter with the maroon Elk horns logo of General Elk on it. The pilot was doing pre-flight checks. Nearby she could make out more hostiles. She moved in and prepared to engage.

As she approached the hostiles, she got a better look at them. A trace of annoyance at herself flashed across her face.

"You're getting too jumpy, Yie," she muttered to herself, "Don't let what happened at [REDACTED] get to you. Focus! That was a bad time but you need to be here and now, not distracted by then."

What she had thought were hostiles turned out to be fuel drums stacked near the helipad. Just shadows. Not real.

She inched forward to just a few metres from the helicopter. From the cover of a tarpaulin-covered supply stack, she could see the hulking figure of General Elk in the back of the helicopter. She swung her K9 round and fired off a burst of rounds. The glass of the helicopter's windows shattered. General Elk twitched in the back. She was certain she had hit him. The pilot lifted the helicopter off and managed to get 20 metres up before she shifted aim from the General to him. A single snap shot killed him instantly and the helicopter plunged back to the helipad out of control spraying fuel all over.

A moment later the helicopter exploded.

"Mission complete," Yie told herself and moved swiftly but silently back to her Zodiac, the way lit by the glare of burning aviation fuel. She climbed into the raft and paddled quietly away.

Credits roll

Post credits scene: The camera focuses on the burning helicopter. A hulking, burning figure crawls from the wreckage, obviously hurt. A scarred face turns to camera as the figure lies on the ground and snarls at us.

Conclusion

That went a lot more smoothly than the games I played over the past few nights. The biggest hiccup was not drawing any location cards at the start, so my first turn involved using all my actions to draw cards. A single hostile who just walked right past my soldier was little threat. Having the helicopter only guarded by shadows was a serious bonus. The objective card only gave me 2 turns to destroy the helicopter, and you have to eliminate the hostiles first, because they screen it. Drawing cards that meant I automatically defeated the helicopter's defence rating was very handy. No reinforcements turned up, and being able to illuminate my exit point made it easier to get out. All in all, that went about as smoothly as a mission can, and the noise level never even got close to waking all the bad guys.

Let's hope the studios enjoyed this pilot episode and buy the series, so that Deadly Woman Yie can return in a new feature: Army of One.

Operation Catch that Pigeon (Warfighter: Shadow War)

 Freundel was on his own for this one. It was a small mission where too many soldiers would be obvious. His mission was to sneak through to a small airbase on the edge of the small Eastern European town of Tristness, where he was to hijack a helicopter and get it back to base. He needed to move silently and quickly. With any luck, he would not make contact with the enemy at all, but he was geared up for bear just in case. A hunting knife at his side and his MP7 were all he really needed, but he also had his night goggles, the best boots money could buy and a selection of ammunition and grenades in case the proverbial fecal matter hit the whirling blades.

The chopper touched down. There was a road block ahead. He moved into position only to realise that there was a sentry right beside him. Fortunately, the sentry was more interested in his Gauloise than in keeping look out. A single shot from the suppressed MP7 downed the sentry, and Freundel pulled the poor sod into cover.

"Hah, I did that one left-handed," he muttered to himself.

Just as well he had concealed the body, because a Hind was hovering over the street. It circled a couple of times before flying off. Lucky break.

Moving past the road block, Freundel wormed through the drainage ditches of a busy highway. Properly busy. Did everyone in this damned country drive BMPs? It sure seemed like it. BMPs, just the job for the school run. He ducked a couple of times as the BMP drove past, followed by a GAZ jeep. The vehicles roared off into the distance as several Gauloise-smoking civilians wandered down the street. They never even say Freundel, cloaked in the shadows as he was.

A suspected enemy soldier resolved itself into a rotary clothesline. Freundel mentally kicked himself for getting jumpy as he approached a checkpoint ahead just as a T72 passed through. It drove on, but paused as Freundel shot another guard who got to close. The commander got out his binos and scanned around but did not see Freundel. Moments later the T72 moved on and was soon lost from sight.

As he approached the airfield, Freundel heard another helicopter taking off, but it headed off in the opposite direction. He took out the guard at the airfield and began breaking into the helicopter. It did not take him long and very soon he was flying along in the nap of the earth towards his base. Mission complete.

I had a yen to play Warfighter: Shadow War this evening, so I dug it out and set up a solo mission. I was allowed one soldier and as much equipment as he could carry. Well, as much as I could afford for the fairly generous points allowance anyway. What has put me off playing this more so far are the extra rules for night actions. These cover noise, unaware enemies and what happens the balloon goes up and they all suddenly realise you are there. Luckily, in this game I did not need to worry about this last. It could have gone very differently if all the heavy machinery that I encountered had hung around.

Warfighter: Shadow War is a game of sneaking. You try not to make noise and look for ways to mitigate any noise you do make. If you make too much noise or hang around in areas where there are too many enemies, you will get spotted and then you will have to shoot your way out. I suppose with a full team, that might not be so bad, but I was playing with a single soldier, and would not have the firepower to do any more than take out individuals. So, sneaky was the watchword.

One potential problem for the player in this game is that the unaware enemies move randomly. I got lucky and many moved off out of the combat area, but I could easily have wound up with tanks and combat choppers hanging around in my location making life difficult for me if the dice had been a bit different.

All this makes it quite a different game from the daytime version of the game where blowing things up is de rigueur. This is a good thing. Shadow War is the scenes from the start of the movie where the heroes are stealing into the enemy compound to rain all-out thermonuclear heck down on the bad guys. Warfighter is the climactic scene at the end where everything gets blown up. There is room for both in my world.