ocketmen: Axis of Evil returns science-fiction gamers to a good old-fashioned future in which the space fleets of the evil Legion of Terra and their Martian lackeys fight against an alliance of rebel Earthers, Venusians and Mercurians.
Heavily inspired by Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers and their kin, Rocketmen is WizKids' pulp science-fiction follow-up to its original "constructible strategy game," Pirates. As with the earlier game, players buy packs of styrene cards on which are printed the components for two starships, some asteroids and a handful of resource tokens.
Players punch out these pieces, build their ships and then deploy three asteroids. Two serve as home bases for the players and are located at either side of a handy dining-room table. A third rogue asteroid is placed in the center of the map, and resources tokens—representing titanium, newtonium and carbon-7—are scattered face-down around the map. Players can attempt to mine these resources, hoping to secure the right combination of elements to build one of their reserve ships, or they can ignore them and engage their enemies head-on.
There are four classes of ships—fighters, rocketships, cruisers and space stations—and each of them has its own strengths and weaknesses. Fighters, for example, can evade enemy attacks, while rocketships can strike at extreme range by sacrificing accuracy. The vital statistics for each ship are noted on a card, including how many actions it gets, how good its targeting computers are, and how fast it can move, but not how many weapons or shields it has. These latter stats are determined by players at the start of each game, as they affix weapon or shield pods to the ship's various hard points. Ships can also be enhanced by crew, which grants their vessels additional bonuses and abilities.
Ships and crew each cost a certain number of points. In a typical game, players build fleets comprised of 30 points of active ships/crew and 30 points of reserve ships/crew that can come into play through mining resources. Players win by destroying the enemy fleet, or successfully invading and conquering their opponents' home asteroid.
Build your own future
There have been plenty of tabletop science-fiction miniature games, but what sets Rocketmen apart is its constructible nature. The mechanic transforms what would otherwise by a two-dimensional battle into a three-dimensional war, and all without having to paint and finish a small armada of miniatures. Better still, all of the ships can be collapsed and reinserted into their styrene cards, making storage a snap.
Constructing the ships is fast and fun, with little of the occasional head-scratching that accompanied building 18th-century sailing ships for the earlier Pirates game. The Flash Gordon-inspired rocketship designs look great, and it's a pleasure to see two fleets fully deployed on the battlefield. That pleasure doesn't extend to the crew illustrations, which attempt to merge pulp with Batman-inspired animation to create something that feels hollow and forced.
The core battle mechanic—roll two six-sided dice, add the result together and try to beat the attack value on the aggressor's ship card—is easy to master, but the various defensive powers in the game, from shield pods to special ship characteristics to crew, mix things up nicely. The ability to add and subtract weapon and shield pods may seem like a minor thing, but it greatly increases the game's depth: a battle cruiser can be transformed from a pondering quasi-freighter into an juggernaut bristling with firepower ... and very few defenses.
As with the first generation of most WizKids games, there are the occasional ambiguous rules—for example, are the action points for a fighter squadron divided up among the individual ships, or does each one get that amount?—but those issues are easily puzzled through or resolved with some help from the WizKids forums.
WizKids claims that everything a person needs to play is included in a single game pack, and while that's technically true, players will find they need four to five packs in order to field a fully themed and effective fleet. Still, given the price for boosters, that's still not a lot of money, especially compared to more traditional tabletop miniature games, like Warhammer 40k or Battlefleet Gothic.
Rocketmen isn't for everyone, and veteran tabletop wargamers may find its rules too simplistic and the ship design too juvenile. That said, more casual gamers should get a kick out of it, particularly those who revel in the idea of space-opera battleships exchanging thunderous broadsides while the fate of the galaxy (or at least Earth) hangs in the balance.
I had a blast playing this game, and I expect that it'll quickly move into "A" territory with the release of one or two expansions and the rule revisions and clarifications that they inevitably bring.
—Ken
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