The recent transfer of Traveller to Mongoose caused me to finally get off my butt and get a CD order to Far Future Enterprises in for pdfs of a whole bunch of Classic Traveller materials. Mongoose's FAQ said that FFE would continue selling CDs but hey, the future is a big place and things can change.
I was particularly curious to get a look at some of the "alternate combat system" CT boardgames like Mayday and Snapshot. I have heard that Warhammer 40k has some roots in early Traveller material (Games Workshop had the license to publish Traveller in the UK in the early 80s; I don't think it's a coincidence that the Imperium of Man looks a bit like the Third Imperium with the madness dial turned up to 11), and when I heard that Snapshot is a game of close-combat boarding actions using action points, well, I couldn't help but think of Space Hulk and was very curious to see if there were any resemblance. I think there's some GW Traveller material on the Apocrypha 2 disk that I look forward to taking a look at (and even some Judge's Guild Traveller material!)
Anyway, Snapshot.
It's a surprisingly-short rulebook, only 43 pages in pdf including cover material and reference tables. Two pages of introduction to the premise and die-rolling conventions, five pages of basic rules covering the action economy, facing, and movement, four pages of rules dealing basically with resolving attacks (to-hit and damage, including several sources of circumstantial to-hit modifiers like firing in zero-G), and two and a smidge pages of "special rules" for things like encumbrance, autofire, and darkness. After that we move basically into scenario setup (including character generation). So the core of the game is really only about 10 (dense) pages.
This density leads to some brevity, and there are definitely some points that I'm not clear on. How much damage does it take to breach a wall? (aha, it's in the section at the end on reading the starship maps) Are explosion markers purely informational or do they have effects? What about casualty markers?
The "cover" action is implemented in a very interesting way, where you place a "target" marker to indicate the line of sight that you are covering, and then you can take attacks on enemies crossing your line of sight to the target marker. But there are some curious edge-cases here too - you can fire on any number of enemies crossing the line (up to your available ammunition), but you can only fire on each enemy once, even if they're eg advancing up the line of fire directly towards you?
Generally I think the action points here are maybe a little too fine-grained. An average character has 14 action points per turn (the sum of their Dex and End scores)! That's a lot. Many actions take fairly large numbers of points - aimed-firing an automatic weapon costs 12, opening a hatch is five, and reloading is a variable amount depending on your ability scores. It all seems rather fiddly against Space Hulk's single-digit numbers. On reflection, since Space Hulk came out about a decade later, it makes sense that even if it were descended, we should expect it to be more polished.
On the other hand, with 15-second rounds, 14 action points per round means that an action point is about one second for an average person. Which is an interesting concrete point of reference.
The initiative / action order system is also a bit curious. The character with the fewest action points goes first, but any character with a higher action-point total can pre-empt them and take their turn before any character with a lower action-point total. I think this is roughly morally-equivalent to Domains at War's strategic initiative, where characters with high initiative act first but can delay down to an initiative count equal to -1 * their initiative score. But framing it as pre-emption rather than delay is an interesting choice; the order starts out inverted.
This action-point-economy and initiative system seem like the main changes over stock Classic Traveller combat (well, that and putting it on squares instead of loose range bands). Damage is largely the same as in CT (damage to ability scores) and there are big tables of weapon-vs-armor and weapon by range band to-hit DMs. It's possible that there are subtle differences here from CT's tables but I am unlikely to find them or to appreciate their full effects.
Moving on to character generation, there's a one-page simplified chargen system which deals purely with combat skills (randomly-rolled on one of two chosen tables, naturally) and physical ability scores. It's actually rather neat to see generation of broadly-Traveller-compatible characters boiled down this far. There are also very cursory rules for stats for animals who have gotten loose in the hold or who are the pets of crewmen.
Four scenarios are presented in some details over a couple pages, plus short sketches for a few more. I don't envy the player who has to go up against pirates in combat armor with some deckhands with shotguns and pistols.
There were a couple of omissions here that surprised me. Sneaking is an action you can take that inflicts a to-hit DM on fire against you, but there doesn't appear to be any hidden information here (besides "are these guys in combat armor pirates we should fight or actually customs agents like they say?") even though I could certainly see some interesting gameplay arising from information asymmetries between eg a crew with a guy watching cameras from the cockpit and a bunch of boarders who don't know the layout. There's also no psychology; no morale, no panic, no hesitation. It's an interesting contrast with the finely-detailed timekeeping; the characters may fumble to pick up a weapon off of the floor or whiff a shot, but they never hesitate to turn a corner into gunfire. It's also particularly strange with the animals rules; they're played much the same as humans with different stats and have no instinctive behavior like fleeing / recoiling from gunfire.
(Fun fact: Alien came out the same year as Snapshot. Coincidence?)
So, conclusions. Would I use these rules as written? Probably not; dealing with two-digit AP totals per round sounds like a tough sell. It's an interesting idea though, and I'm told that Azhanti High Lightning is also a CT boarding combat game and improves on Snapshot, so maybe I'll read that next. Also, is Space Hulk a knock-off of Snapshot? No - if it is descended, it has definitely sanded down many rough edges and added significant innovations (like the hidden information of blips, board segments used to define flamer area of effect, and weapons and actions rosters cut down to the essentials).
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