6. What can we learn from Into the Breach?

 

Fig 1. The mechs are positioned and begin their assault. Notice how the one mech utilizes the environment by pushing the mech into water, killing it.

I love Into the Breach, It is a wonderful tactics game that has been tightly designed and polished to do what it does best and I think that there are a number of things from it that are ripe for stealing, or at least considered when running TTRPGs. So what is it? As I mentioned it is a tactics game, where you run a small team of mechs that have been sent from the future to help save what remains of humanity from the giant bug apocalypse. Each mission is played out turn by turn on a 8x8 grid (Fig 1) which has various bits of terrain with significant tactical implications. The goal of each mission will differ slightly but it will be some variation of wiping out the bugs and preventing them from destroying you and the holdouts of humanity that occupy the buildings strewn about each map. You accomplish this via a team of very specialized mechs. Each has 1-2 unit-specific actions they can take and they have movement that is also unique to each unit. Most of that probably sounds like what you would expect from a tactics game about protecting humanity from giant bugs but there are things which make this game really take-off. 

Fig 2. Red arrows and red zebra-shaded regions indicate the areas that the bugs will attack unless the player does something about it. The artillery mech pushes 2 bugs back, preventing the bugs from attacking their targets

One of the biggest mechanics of the game is that you have perfect knowledge about what the bugs will attack on their turn, giving the player a chance to figure out out to foil their actions and prevent taking damage or having civilian structures damaged (Fig. 2). They will continue to attack a space of an equivalent direction and distance, even if they have been moved. So one of the key strategies is to shift the position of the bugs around such that they are no longer attacking you and your allies, and sometimes even attacking each other. It turns combat into an interesting puzzle, especially when you don't have enough actions to do everything you want on your turn despite the perfect knowledge. You have to make hard decisions on what to protect and what to kill. 

I think this telegraphing mechanic is something we can use in our games, where we clearly telegraph what the enemy looks like they are going to do on their next turn, before the players act. It can be as simple as saying something like "These orcs are eyeing Hagas and look like they are about to charge him, while this other group greedily eyes the refugees storehouse." This has the benefit of giving the players a similar puzzle to that of Into the Breach, where they have to make some decisions about who they are targeting and how they can foil the plans of the enemy, which I think is fun. I also think it adds a degree of verisimilitude because you have telegraphed the intentions of the enemy, making them more real, rather than just units on a map. I think it also serves to smooth out the difficulty of challenging fights. Telegraphing that the enemy wizard is about to nuke the party with a fireball will have a very different player response than just having them get walloped by it without warning. 

The other thing which I love about Into the Breach is how fluid the battlefield is because pretty much every bug and every mech has an ability which allows you to push and pull the the other in various ways (Fig. 1,2). It also never feels like you are wasting an action to do so because every ability that pushes an enemy around also has the potential to do damage, either directly or by using the environment (Fig.1). That damage is significant because  every unit rarely has more than 4 hit points and every attack does at least 1 damage or can outright kill the bugs. We rarely see this kind of movement in the TTRPG space and if it is there it is often not paired with significant damage (why doesn't fireball scatter enemies like bowling pins?). Often it feels like one death ball colliding with the other death ball and then we all do math until one side drops (or hopefully retreats before that point). I would love to see more of the Intro the Breach movement ethos applied in TTRPGs. I think the MCDM RPG and ICON are keeping mobility in mind as enemies can be shuffled around for various advantages or thrown through walls for extra damage. This is also something you can "patch" into your existing games by adding magic items/powers that can move characters around to the game world, or by having environments that force different types of movement, which Into the Breach does really well.

Fig. 3. The tank destroys the dam to submerge and kill 2 bugs. You can also see two points on the map where bugs can enter from that can be blocked.

The last thing (though I am sure there are other gold nuggets I'm missing) I wanted to mention is how interactive the environment is in Into the Breach (Fig. 3). That tiny (by most TTRPG standards) 8x8 grid has so many environmental features that force you to do things you wouldn't normally do or can be exploited to bring ruin to the bugs. You can slam bugs into mountains for extra damage, kill them instantly by destroying the ice they are walking on and submerging them, use ancient old earth weapons to knock them around the map, or sit on their emergence points to keep them from spawning in the next round. Ice, water, and fire can change up mech movement and civilian structures need protecting or you will lose precious resources and maybe even lose the mission. The whole map is essentially a toy that the player can interact with and very few things are just set dressing.

In Knave 2e, it is recommended that players "apply tactical infinity" which means that they should turn every aspect of the game world to their advantage and nothing mentioned is ever just fluff. I think this is a great way to look at the environment but I also think that the game master should make an effort to include elements that can be interactive in combat if possible (just 1-2 I think already add a lot of texture) or encourage the players to ask if there are certain elements present that they can use.

I highly recommend checking Into the Breach out the next time a sale rolls around. Not only is there a lot we can learn from it, but it is also just a great game to play. I believe it is available on pretty much any platform.