Cybermetal Streets

In the aftermath of a years long feud between America and Hell; demons, mutated vermin, circuit-bent corpses, and tech-enhanced humans battle it out in the ruined streets of Pentagram City. It’s fast. It’s edgy-as-shit.

It’s Cybermetal Streets, a skirmish game by world champ Adam Vass.

I managed to snag a copy of this scrappy zine after spotting Adam across the purple-lit halls of the Grimdark Alley at Adepticon. This is the alpha v.01 edition of this game, printed how zines this punk maybe should be, black ink on yellow copy paper. Adam is upfront on the inside cover that this is not the final vision for the game. But there’s some really interesting stuff going on that makes me excited for what that vision will materialize as. Let’s get into it.

The game takes place in the dystopian streets, sewers, and scrap heaps of Pentagram City; where two gangs are entangled in a violent turf war (there are other reasons but that’s more-or-less the gist).

You’ve got four punks to each side. Each has two chosen skills, broad but evocative keywords, that have a value ranging from 55 to 67. When you attack or make risky moves, you take a d100 (comprised of two d10s) and try to roll under the skill’s value to determine whether they succeed or fail.

It’s nothing new and super simple. But the limitation of having only two skills, that are nothing more than a single word, opens them up to creative interpretation. The game doesn’t want to be a highly competitive, balanced, narrowly defined snoozefest. It wants the players to bend the limits, push a narrative, and get into goofy blood-drenched shenanigans.

Punks are straightforward. What really makes them interesting comes later, often in play.

As an example, what does it mean for my punk to “scramble”? Are they scrambling down rain-slick rooftops and into a pile of trash? Maybe they’re scrambling the signal for a remotely controlled door; opening it for a quick escape or slamming it shut for solid cover. Or they go more analog, and scramble some poor sap’s brains with an iron pipe. The skills can be broadly applied, but don’t lose any narrative flavor in the process. And the words Adam has chosen for the skills reinforce the gritty neon-soaked themes of Cybermetal.

There may be a gang of vermin in my future. Stinging, stenching vermin.

A neat little tool that amplifies these themes even further, is the design for movement in the game.

It’s done with a cassette tape. I’m seeing more of these thematic objects being used to define a game’s standard measurements, and it’s great to see Adam using it here. Punching it up even further, he has plans to release a soundtrack for Cybermetal on the cassette tape. Sweet mother of god.

You have the long end, width, and the short end, height. Each punk can move twice. Horizontally up to the tape’s width, and vertically up to its height. So long as the punk is in contact with the tape at the start and end of each movement, it’s fair game. Again, super lightweight but heavy on theme. And the game is getting out of the way for what I really want to talk about here.

Embracing unpredictability and saying to hell with balance.

This starts with the board upon which the game is played. There’s a high degree of randomness while setting up the game. You’re rolling a bunch of dice, and based on their result and where they land, different kinds of interactable terrain are placed. One of them is a dang falafel cart that acts like a healing wagon; circling around the board before ending their shift. There’s a skin printer to regenerate killed gang members, and a terminal for downloading new abilities. Things that will meaningfully change the players’ priorities and how they move around the board. Dumpsters full of useful items or weird trash might pop up. Along with piles of corpses that pose a threat to anyone that falls in. It adds a great deal of surprise to each game, which pairs really nicely with the loose and creative intent put into Cybermetal.

To add to its unpredictable nature, each attack is used to decrement the Fallout die. A d10 that, when it reaches 0, triggers some game-changing effect. Almost entire gangs can blink around the board. Reality edits will move a building from right beneath your feet. Anomalies will put a gravitational well at the center of the board or turn the floor into sludge. This, combined with the terrain generation, is really where the game sets itself apart.

It tears out the fleshy innards of a skirmish game and retrofits it with sparking haphazard spontaneity. You have to work with what you’re given, the odd bits and junk parts. Deployment is even a semi-random dexterity game. The players roll dice and place the models where they land or somewhere nearby, depending if the result is even or odd.

There’s not much list building here apart from selecting your four punks and their skills. The gang leader’s ability is determined by rolling twice and picking between the two results. All of a gang’s items are scrounged and scrapped, randomly determined before distributed to each member.

Print the zine, grab your models, get to the table, and tear each other apart!

Cybermetal Streets, in this iteration, is messy. It’s missing a few bits. Some of it is a little undercooked. Which is why I’ll cherish this zine forever. The game is going to evolve into something very, very cool.