# Precipice tags: #game/wargame/precipice ![[Precipice (cover).jpg|600]] **Precipice** is a mech wargame about *piloting* a single machine, which turns out to be a meaningfully different thing from commanding one. It's the design brainchild of **Max Brooke** — the former Fantasy Flight designer who cut his teeth on both editions of Star Wars X-Wing — and it's currently living the free open-alpha life under **Wild Plum Games** while a Kickstarter hums in the background. The pitch is "bring your own mech," and it's not marketing: the game is miniature-agnostic by temperament, because Brooke would rather you dig a lovingly painted walker out of your pile than buy another one off him. The spotlight never leaves your one machine, the controls are deliberately a little fighty, and the whole thing is built around the friction between what you order your mech to do and what it actually manages to do when the plans collide. ## Setting "*In the hazy breach of possibilities between countless worlds, machines heave and guns roar. Steel breaks, and soldiers die.*" That's the whole cosmology, and it's plenty — **Precipice** sits at the edge of clashing realities, where mechs from whatever worlds you care to imagine collide in fights for survival. Wild Plum deliberately keeps the fiction a setting-agnostic frame rather than a fixed world: the encounter is the unit of story, not the map. Games run from quick 30-to-60-minute duels to chaotic free-for-all brawls to **linked sorties** — campaigns strung across multiple encounters in which your pilot scrambles for supplies and survival. Encounters are set on battlefields with **Thresholds** (where units enter and leave), **Objectives** and mysterious **Enigmas**, and players are expected to improvise whatever terrain they own and whatever world makes sense for the fight. You play a **pilot** — a real character with a name, a Reflexes value, Nerves, and a strain limit — the person in the cockpit whose travails you follow most closely. A pilot can disembark and act independently, but mostly they ride their machine. Every mech is a collection of **Parts** (a core, arms, legs) and **Gear** (weapons and secondary systems), each with its own strain limit, and the grim fun of the game is watching your war machine get torn apart piece by piece while you keep fighting in what's left. ## Mechanics ### The Input-Action System The signature loop. Encounters run **Setup → Bursts → Conclusion**, and the bulk of play is the bursts. At the start of each burst, every player lays down a facedown **input chain** — a sequence of Input cards (each with an initiative value and an action icon) that represents the pilot queuing a string of commands to the mech. Then, over the burst's rounds, everyone flips their chain open one card at a time and resolves in initiative order — so you're locked into what you programmed before you see what your opponent is doing. It's the X-Wing action-selection DNA re-framed as piloting: your brilliant plan is only as good as the friction between those plans when they meet. ### Dice Resolution is d6-based. **Xd6** rolls that many dice, each scoring success on **5+** (default) and botch on **1**; attacks count successes, so a 4d6 attack that comes up 5, 6, 1, 3 inflicts 2 damage. **2d6[+]** adds two dice for bell-curved random tables; **d66** uses one die as tens and one as ones for flat-probability tables. ### Attacks, Damage, and Strain Attacks are **Melee** or **Salvo**, each rolling their listed dice against success value, delivered through an attack **arc**, at a measured **range** down a **fire line**. Terrain and intervening units impede and even intercept hits, and a smaller unit in the path eats stray hits off botched dice — the battlefield is a set of resources and threats, not a pile of modifiers. Damage resolves through **strike points** and **exposed parts**: the controlling player assigns damage and strain across exposed components, and a part tracks **intact → damaged → destroyed** (pilots go **healthy → wounded → incapacitated**, terrain **sturdy → ruined → demolished**). A component that hits its **strain limit** dumps the strain and takes a damage. Mechs build **momentum** as they lumber, so an opponent knocking you off course can send all that tonnage sliding into a building. ### Missions and Forces You field a **force** — pilot, mech, a cache of spare gear, and optionally support units — and score **Victory Points** toward an encounter's **mission**, which can be open or secret. The game leans hard on destructible terrain and scenario design; encounters like the included **Crash Course** lay out beacons, enigmas, and thresholds for you to chase. Miniature **size categories** (from Small Size-2 up to Gargantuan Size-6) base a mech's scale on whatever model you actually put on the table. ## Editions - **Open Alpha v1.0** (2026) — the first free public playtest of the rules. *Not in the library.* - **Open Alpha v1.1** (2026) — the current free playtest rules. *In the library.* The finished game is still forthcoming: Wild Plum Games is running the playtest now, with a Kickstarter to follow. As an open alpha it's entirely free at the moment. ## Supplements - **Crash Course** (2026) — the game's introductory encounter: a free, standalone training scenario where each pilot slaloms a beacon-activated "racecourse" through a training ground to extract, scoring points for activating beacons in order. It also ships two printable **L-Trak** mech sheets. Plays 1–4 pilots. *In the library.* ## References - [Precipice: Mech Miniatures Combat — Wild Plum Games](https://www.wildplumgames.com/precipice) - [Precipice — Get Updates / Open Alpha (free playtest)](https://www.wildplumgames.com/get-precipice-updates) - [Try the Open Alpha Today](https://www.wildplumgames.com/precipice-alpha) - ["Star Wars X-Wing designer talks about his new mecha wargame" — Wargamer (Timothy Linward)](https://www.wargamer.com/precipice/star-wars-x-wing-designer) - [Precipice: Mech Miniatures Combat — Kickstarter](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1847961861/precipice-mech-miniatures-combat)