RaW: Crossfire

In this episode of Tales & Tactics, our Rules as Written series covers Crossfire, the 1996 company level World War II miniatures game designed by Arty Conliffe. Born from a challenge issued at Historicon in 1995 to design a historical miniatures wargame without two features present in most rulesets (rulers and fixed game turns), Crossfire remains one of the most distinctive and quietly radical designs the hobby has ever produced. Rather than traditional turn based play, Crossfire plays with an initiative system where a player may order troops in any way across movement, fire, and rally actions in any order, continuing to do so until one of his actions fails. At this moment, initiative passes to the opponent. Units advance in realistic tactical bounds from terrain feature to terrain feature, with no arbitrary units of measurement, and everything that can be seen can be shot at which makes terrain selection and table density critical to the game’s function. Thirty years on, Crossfire feels less like a period piece and more like a design ahead of its time, asking deep questions about infantry command, suppression, and tactical momentum.