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Sorry about the lack of updates! We've been having a bad year, and while that's no excuse, we can confirm that the text for Issue 5 is complete and is getting laid out now; it should be out within the next month. 

Issue 6 is a bigger project, and we'll announce more details after Issue 5's release.

Thanks for your patience.

Hi! Our old website is defunct for cost reasons - we mostly sell physical copies through other retailers now. For Skirmish, we currently don't have any physical stock as we're planning on a comprehensive rules update before we get another batch printed. In the meantime, the digital copy is your best bet for playing Skirmish.

The character sheets and note pages once hosted on our now defunct website are now included in the Play Aids download! These are also available inside the main book itself for photocopying in the event you have a physical copy. I'll make the play aids available as a free download now, thanks for letting me know.

Tournament Arc uses the Belonging Outside Belonging system! It's a GM-less (or "GM-ful") system where everyone takes cahrge of the narrative, rather than one designated player. Each playbook comes with prompts for what you might do in a given situation, and there's a token system that allows you to use more narratively challenging moves. Tournament Arc adds in Episodes which have their own prompts, which help you and your play group create a fun story with your characters!

Just uploaded them for you now!

https://biscuitfund.itch.io/goblin-country

Added them for you!

We'll have a look to see if we can upload individual pages in addition to spreads, but we encourage you to check out https://biscuitfundgames.com/ where you can get a physical copy!

Thanks for all of those questions! Some of these are good catches based on proofreading errors we made in the text – late-game Skirmish went through a lot of rewrites, so we’re very thankful for the help in getting the final text updated.

1) Yes, as written this does allow you to move things infinitely. Good catch – the Field Officer should only be able to use its Weathered Blade ability through the effect of Opportunist. We’ll add this to the update log.

2) A Honywood unit on a Dusthorse is considered a combined unit, so will only take damage once from area of effect skills as you describe. Wasps are considered combined units during the Action Phase, and so a stack of Wasps will only take damage once from a single area of effect attack.

3) Yes, all of the Hardpoints need to be on the map, so you cannot deploy an Ovatten with four complete hardpoints on the very back row of your deployment zone as the rear hardpoint will need space to be deployed. Hardpoints are considered part of the unit and so will block movement, so if there’s a one-space gap in cover then the Ovatten will be unable to move through it without destroying the cover first. It’s a big machine! Incidentally, this is why the Bunker Breaker attack on the Heavy Caliver instantly destroys cover.

4) Another editing thing we missed in the last stages of the book – originally the terms defined in the Glossary section were divided into Unit Characteristics, Actions and Keywords, but as the only two Keywords we had were Vulnerable and Resist we ended up folding that into the general action glossary. We missed that while we were changing everything else to match!

Since we’ve started work on other things in the Skirmish system we’ve started using Keywords again, so consider Vulnerable and Resist the only Keywords in the core book. Spell of Forgetting consequently removes any Vulnerable and Resist a unit has, as well as any effects applied to a unit like the Sidekick’s I’m Innocent!.

5) No, as being used to power an adjacent Lantern’s attack counts as taking an action. Let’s say that we have four Lanterns in a square formation as follows:

1 2
3 4

If 1 uses Consuming Passion, then only 2 and 3 are adjacent to it, so the attack will deal 5 damage. As 2 and 3 are now considered to have acted, 4 is unable to use Consuming Passion as there are no adjacent Lanterns who haven’t acted this turn.

6) Multiple uses of Slink Away do not stack, so you will only block the next instance of damage and move up to 2.

7) Yes.

8) The rules for the limitation of five connected pieces of cover are constantly active, not just during setup, so you would be unable to use Geomancy to block off the battlefield without clever positioning. Damage is not healed when Geomancy is used to increase cover size, so a piece of half cover with one “health” left will still be destroyed in one hit from anything if it becomes full cover through Geomancy.

9) Yes. Multiple sources of Resist and Vulnerable stack, so if you used two Reveille! on a unit it would have Resist 2 for a turn.

10) Yes. As they have no units left to command, the player will be considered Tabled and will lose the game. With regards to the matchup between Machinist Core and the Followers of Untruth, it’s a bit of an uphill battle if you only have one Ovatten, but in our testing we’ve seen the matchup isn’t quite as one-sided: the Ovatten will be able to consistently outrange the Prophet and destroy it without much difficulty due to its lack of Resist.

11) It should hit the unit on the cover. Another editing catch – the Molotov’s second ability should state “deal 4 damage to all units within or adjacent to that Cover.”

We were attempting to get a Tabletop Simulator client running, but encountered some issues getting things working and the dev we were working with has had to drop the project due to time commitments. In the meantime, to play Skirmish remotely pretty much any client that can create dice and a grid – like TTS – can be used as a stopgap. We don’t currently have any plans, or honestly the ability, to make an AI to play the game, but perhaps that’s something we’ll look into if we restart client development!

Couldn't see any way to generate skill numbers or stats for PCs in the main rulebook, or how to determine how many masteries they should have. The rulebook makes some reference to making your own characters however; is this to come later?

Otherwise the book and layout is gorgeous, looking forward to the rest!

Ask them here, friend! Probably useful to have any clarifications I can give on the game page anyway!

https://biscuitfund.itch.io/skirmish

Thanks for the feedback - we're aware the tables are a little cramped right now, and now that we've got the paper release and know it's readable in print, we're satisifed we can make the text smaller and add margins to the tables if we go ahead with another print run.  We'll add it to the to-do list of updates we've got going!

By the way we did the Kickstarter the answer is unfortunately not, but we will be releasing a rules only version without any of the armies soon so you can get a look at the rules while you wait!

It's always the way with jams! Happy to have you as part of the community <3

In case you missed it on the main page, this jam is intended for analog and/or tabletop games; there shouldn’t be any programming to be done! 

ah fair enough! wasn’t sure if that was clear in the text but I like it

Isn’t this just making a house of cards on printed paper with a line of text above it?

That was my one thought myself that I’d have loved to have got some testing in for, but such is the nature of The Jam! Didn’t want to make it complicated like (number of players -3) or something but that might work better for bigger games!

Hi! Is it ok to submit physical games for this jam or are you only accepting digital video games? A 48 Jam is right up my street right now, but I don’t want to tread on any toes.