Ulikton, The Rules

So, these are the rules of Ulikton, The Minimalistic Mecha Wargames Engine.

Equipment: Paper and pencil, miniatures or tin soldiers or whatever, hex battlemat, a 20-sided die for each player, some d6s, d8s, d10s and d12s.

Core Rules

Round: Combat Round is 5 seconds long. Because of this, and because the Mecha are some 10 tons of heavy robot, commands cannot be imparted in real-time by pilots. Therefore before a round starts, every player writes down his Actions (2 to 5 per Round, depending on the Mecha.) Actions can be whatever you want: shoot, move, climb, jump, hover, etc. Every act requires an Action, except for some special acts that are free. Once the Round begins, each Action takes place simultaneously (everyone's first, second, third and so on.)

Combat: Roll a d20, hit on 5+. Each weapon deals fixed damage, armor absorb damage but also gets damaged. You can Parry (1 Action) or Dodge (1 Action), by rolling a d20 scoring more than the attacker's score. If you Parry you have a +5 on your roll. Once you score a hit, roll a d12 (or a d8 or a d10) to find the hit location according to the following table: 1-5 main, 6 left leg, 7 right leg, 8 left arm, 9 right arm, 10 head, 11 main weapon, 12 critical. Critical Subtable: 1-2 generator, 3-4 sensors, 5-6 second cabin. Each Mecha has its hit location table in its description.

And that's all! The document then has about seven pages of pre-generated Mecha. I've called the author this evening, and he told me that the game was derived directly from a roleplaying game called "Mekton", don't know if anyone has ever heard of it. By the way, it's very fast to play, and really fun. I wish I had the time to fix and edit the rules to play it again. "So little time, so much to do", as always.