# Danger Close tags: #game/rpg/danger-close ![[Danger Close (cover).jpg|600]] **Danger Close** is a tactical military skirmish TTRPG by Lars Huijbregts of Dice Goblin Games. It remains deeply amusing that people willingly play games simulating the very meat-grinders that turn eager recruits into rotting casualties. Heavily inspired by franchises like *Warhammer 40k*, *Halo: ODST*, and *Helldivers 2*, the game forces you to command a squad of expendable troopers through hostile territory. Huijbregts notes it is "a war game built on war stories, not on war itself," which essentially translates to watching a favorite grunt die a dramatically satisfying, entirely preventable death. You manage positioning, squad attrition, and momentum while desperately trying to complete an objective before the enemy overwhelms your fragile human assets. ## Setting There is no sprawling campaign world here — the setting is the ground war itself, and the fiction is the mission. You take command of a squad of troopers, each an expendable cog in a larger, dirtier machine that the game neither romanticizes nor excuses. The unit pushes forward through hostile territory, sector by ruined sector, toward an objective, while weather, fatigue, and the local threat level stack the odds against it. The flavor sits squarely in the grim-soldier genre: the Imperial Guard's expendability, ODST's dropped-into-the-void desperation, and Helldivers' cheerful, fire-and-forget attrition. Whatever the fluff, your job is to get a handful of fragile humans in and out alive — or watch them die dramatically, which the game treats as a perfectly serviceable ending. ## Mechanics The whole engine is built around pushing your luck and hoping the dice gods are merciful to infantrymen. It leans on a small vocabulary of rolls and tracks rather than a thicket of subsystems. ### Advance & sectors As the squad pushes into a new **Sector**, you make an **Advance Roll** with **2d6**, modified by weather, fatigue, and the local threat level. The result decides whether you catch the enemy sleeping or walk straight into a textbook ambush — the tone of the whole fight that follows. ### Exchanges & momentum Once the firefight starts, combat breaks into **Exchanges**, and you track the battle's overall **Momentum** on a track from **Defeat to Victory**. Gaining or losing Momentum is the central currency of the fight: seize enough and you rout the enemy; let it slide and the squad is overrun. - **Offense Roll** — you pool the squad's Attack (ATK) dice (standard d6s) based on gear and positioning, roll the whole pool, and keep the single highest die. Roll a 6 and you seize Momentum; roll a 3 or lower and the enemy violently pushes the squad back. - **Defense Roll** — each trooper rolls to survive incoming fire. Work out their Defense (DEF) from cover and covering fire: if DEF is 1 or higher, roll that many d6s and keep the highest; if DEF drops to 0 or below, roll 1 plus the negative value in d6s and keep the *lowest*. Armor modifies the result, and you cross-reference the final number against the trooper's position (Flanked, In Cover, Fortified) to see whether they take shrapnel to the face or emerge safe. - **Suppression** — when a trooper fails a Defense Roll you may instead choose to have them become **Suppressed**: they survive the shot, but forfeit their ability to fire in the next Exchange. ### Pressure & grit, and the zoom lens Newer builds layer **Pressure** and **Grit** alongside Momentum, and add an unusual zoom feature: you can shift the action between **individual**, **platoon**, and **mass combat** at need (individual combat adapts Luke Gearing's *Violence*; the mass-combat engine credits Sam Sorensen's *Cataphract*). A mission toolkit and campaign frameworks (Tide of War, hexcrawl missions) round out long-form play, plus a standalone mission, *Jungle Evac*. ## Editions Danger Close is a **single game in active development** rather than a line of editions; the library holds successive draft builds of it as a version-family (v0.96.6, v0.96.8, then the v0.99.x line, with **v0.99.7** the current copy). The v0.95 update shifted the combat math — the Advance Roll went from a clunky 2d3 to a universal 2d6 table, and Suppression, the three-tier perk system (Regimental, Individual, Prestige), and HodagRPG's black line-work arrived. The rules text is released under **CC BY-SA 4.0**; the mission *Jungle Evac* and a Mission Worksheet play aid are also in the library. ## References - [Buy the Game - Itch.io](https://dicegoblingames.itch.io/danger-close-tactical-skirmish-ttrpg) - [Developer's Blog - Dice Goblin](https://dicegoblin.blog/) - [Solo RPG List Entry - Solo RPG List](https://solorpglist.com/item.php?id=1078) A war game built on war stories rather than war itself — **Danger Close** watches expendable troopers die dramatically and dares you to call it a bug instead of a feature.