Battle Report: "Double Tap" from One Page Rules

 

Double Tap - the battleground, the gangs and the opponent...

I got a message from a fellow gamer and friend a week or so back, letting me know that it was his birthday coming up and asking if I was free to host a quick game on the actual day, and seeing as how my schedule was pretty flexible that week, I said yes and began to haul out some terrain in anticipation of his arrival.

I tried my best to make the board interesting and provide a number of awkward obstacles as well as spots for the gangs to hide and snipe at each other from. The it was just a case of breaking out a couple of likely gangs.

Bikers versus Punks seemed to be a natural fit for such a gritty, urban board and so I settled on the Future Wars minis by Copplestone Castings, with the option of adding a heavy to each. When Mike turned up, he had the rules for Double Tap from One Page Rules, and we quickly began putting together a couple of gangs.

Mike chose to play as the Bikers, adding his own leader in the shape of "Mike the Combat Data Analyst", which left me with the Punks. Six gangers a side and with a pretty balanced roster, we set about actually playing the game.

With us both placing one of the objective markers atop a building (the petrol station and the brownstone respectively), both gangs immediately split into teams of three and began to make dashes towards their targets. Mike lead his troops onto the roof of the petrol station and sent his other guys towards the brownstone. My guys countered by sending a trio to the petrol station too, squatting behind a camper van and another three towards the brownstone, using a bendy bus for cover.

The start of the next round saw Mike's guys clambering onto the roof of the petrol station to secure the first objective while the rest of them climbed into the brownstone via a back window. My first trio made it to the front of the petrol station too, ready to pop up next round. But the three punks making for the brownstone came under heavy fire from the top of the petrol station, bullets ripping through the windows of the bus to finish off the punk with the SMG.

Though Mike had already drawn first blood, things didn't go as well for him as soon as my guys climbed up onto the roof of the petrol station. In the vicious firefight that followed, two of his bikers (including his leader) were cut down and the last guy chose to dive off the roof to escape a similar fate. Meanwhile, in the stairwell of the brownstone, his guys had a two storey lead on mine in the race for the second objective.

Although it felt like the tide was shifting in my favour, the next round saw a disastrous reverse of fortunes for the Punks, as Mike's guys in the brownstone split up, two of them bursting out onto the balcony and gunning down my guys across the street. The other, armed with a flamethrower, stayed to hose the stairwell with flames, killing off the last of my Punks on their heels.

Of course, as soon as the coast was clear, the biker that had fled the roof of the petrol station came crawling back out like a vulture to reclaim the objective marker. And that was it, game over - I was probably letting Mike win on an unconscious level, what with it being his birthday and all. But I'm sure there'll be a rematch in the near future, one in which the Punks can win back some of their glory from those greasy Bikers and their pen-pushing leader!

All in all, this set of rules was a hell of a lot of fun to play and very quick to learn, with the few issues we encountered able to be resolved on the fly with a small application of common sense. To say that Double Tap is so easily available and speedy to get a game going with, you'd be mad not to have a copy saved somewhere, just in case someone wants a game at short notice.