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I bought Majestic 13, the newest game from Snarling Badger studios, on the day it was released but I’ve held off on a Majestic 13 review until I had some time to play through several solo scenarios. And that’s what the game is targeted at: it’s a solo game first and foremost, though there are ways to play it co-op or even skirmish (one player team against another). But the way it’s primarily designed to be played is on Majestic 13 team–five models–against a single (or several) aliens.

For starters in this Majestic 13 review, I have to say that I love that this is a solo game. But don’t let that fool you into thinking that this game is simple: the world building in this game is extensive and in-depth, and has everything that you could want in a small-press wargame ruleset.

Majestic 13 Review: What is Majestic 13 Anyway?

Majestic 13 is a modern, alternative history–or What If?–game that supposes that aliens have been invading Earth for the better part of the last eighty years, and they are being combated by a consortium of 13 organization who are all (kinda) working together.

Majestic 13 Review: Lore Overview:

Majestic 13 is a fairly straightforward game, with some unique mechanics, but the glory of Majestic 13 is that it has so much depth in team creation and in the campaign play. I like the mechanics–some quite a bit–but where it really shines is in the worldbuilding.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

What is the Majestic 13: There are 13 organization who are loosely conglomerated, all of who are ostensibly working together, but who come from different backgrounds.

The 13 organization of Majestic 13 are:

• ODEAR: The Office of the Department of Extraterrestrial and Alien Research, who works primarily under the auspices of the national parks and Department of the Interior. They have bonuses for playing Wilderness scenarios.
• Psight-Ops: The one group that automatically comes with Psionic abilities, usintg Psionic Gear and Psionic Abilities.
• Agricultural League: With all the crop circles in the corn fields, it only makes sense that the Agricultural Center will be research cattle mutilations.
• Industrial Arms: This is Majestic 13’s Military Industrial Complex. They have access to better equip and are the most militarized.
• The Sanctum: A break off of the Catholic Church who has their own reasons for wanting to quash alien incursions. They get an exclusive home base (we’ll talk about bases later).
• Silicon Syndicate: This member of the Majestic 13 gets all the tech bonuses, as they’re the group sponsored and paid by tech companies.
• The Naturalized: There are aliens in the Majestic 13 and they are joining the fight against other aliens–the Naturalized are the “good” aliens who have been hunted to near extinction by the other aliens and they’re eager to get retribution (and simply survive).
• Women’s Defense Force: After the end of World War II there were a lot of women with a lot of good skills, and they have carried that forward into the present with an all-female defense force.
• Roughnecks: Made up of miners and industrial workers, these extra tough guys are rough around the edges.
• Section Six: The outgrowth of the World War II intelligence organization, this is a spy group that has easier access to equipment and intelligence that decreases their chance of bad effects on the FUBAR table (we’ll talk about that in a minute.)
• Hippocratic Mercy: A group of medical professionals, with bonuses to healing their wounded.
• The 1%: The force of the ultra-rich, who naturally have access to all the best equipment.
• Dispersed: The people on the outside: If you’ve seen X-Files these are the Lone Gunmen. The conspiracy theorists. They don’t have access to all the equipment that the other Majestic 13 groups have, but their ability to be outsider and the people you would least expect makes them especially good at infiltration.

Majestic 13 Review Bases:

When you make your team, using one of the Majestic 13 crews, you then get to kit them out in a ton of interesting equipment some of which is more or less available depending on your team. Then you get to choose a base of operations for your crew, which can be anything from Remote Intelligence Base to a Medical Research Base to a Church Sanctum–and more. And depending on which base you choose, there will be anywhere from 8 to 10 upgrades, which range from Advanced Cloning Facilities, to Spy Satellite Links to Upgraded Point Defense. And in Majestic 13, these all in game influences. (Point Defense starts the game with you inflicting extra damage on the aliens, while Human Resources helps with recruiting new members of your team if you’ve lost one.)

Majestic 13 Review Gameplay:

The stats in Majestic 13 are:

• Acuity: Awareness and reaction to threats. Most importantly, Acuity is the stat from which you derive your initiative in battle.
• Combat: A well-simplified stat that encompasses all of combat, both ranged and close combat.
• Dexterity: Determines how good you are at avoiding damage. This applies to both combat but also things like falling damage.
• Fortitude: This is your toughness stat and from it you derive hit points as well as resistance to battle conditions like poison.
• Psionics: Almost no one in the game has a psionics attack (most factions of the Majestic 13, with the exception of Psight-Ops, will have a psionics skill of 0. But when you have it, it can do some cool things.
• Defense: Defense is a set number that all models start with, but can be increased with stats and upgrades.

The way to test skills uses your stat and appropriate modifiers. Stat checks are: your stat, plus D20, plus modifiers.

Actions you can take in the game are Attack, Move, Help Team Member, Protect Team Member, and Call for Aid.

So how does this work in Majestic 13? If you want to shoot an alien with an assault rifle, then you measure the range and if the enemy is close enough, you roll a D20, add it to your Combat score. If your result beats the enemy’s Defense, then you have successfully attacked. The damage of an assault rifle is 2D6, so you roll that and its the amount of hit points the alien loses.

Of course, there are myriad modifiers that can apply to all of this, but not so many that you get confused. It’s generally a well-designed system

Majestic 13 Missions:

Bureaucracy
The campaign system is one of the best things about the game, and there’s a long mission list that you can follow–or you can play one-off scenarios. There are two particularly cool things about missions: beurocracy and FUBAR. Bureauocracy deals with what logistical problems can come up in the game–things like wrong intel about the enemy or ending up in the wrong drop zone.

FUBAR
Standing for “Fouled UP Beyond All Recognition”, this can be anything from civilians showing up at the wrong time to extra aliens showing up to sudden storms.

I LOVE these random elements in the game. They make every mission different, which results in endless variation, and a great way to play pick-up games.

Majestic 13 Hobbying:

There are a lot of options for customizing your Majestic 13 force. You can find virtually any models through 3D printing options. Sonic Sledgehammer painted up some Women’s Defense League models from Wargames Atlantic, as well as an ODEAR force.

In my playtesting with the game I’ve been using Bolt Action models (because they’re the closest thing I have to modern troops) combined with some Necromunda models. So, not perfect, but my Necromunda models have been Roughnecks and the Bolt Action are in Industrial Arms.

And the aliens can be virtually anything that you want. I’ve been using some of Nolzur’s Miniatures and Tyranids. They’re excellent proxies. You can really use anything that you want.

Snarling Badger has provided a handy list of potential models for both factions and aliens.

Majestic 13 Downsides:

It’s not all perfect, though there really aren’t that many downsides.

For starters, the game assumes that you have a lot of scenery, and I just don’t have the scenery it wants. Each mission, whether it’s a premade mission or a random mission, requires a lot of scenery, and when you need a lot of Wildernes scenery AND a lot of Urban scenery, it’s not ideal. Cool if you have it, but kind of frustrating.

Second, the book is not laid out as perfectly as I would like. Or, at least, it’s not intuitive. I realize that this is a passion project of just two people, Adam Loper of Tabletop Minions, and Vince Venturella. And for a two person project it’s admirable, but it could use some better formatting. Fortunately, this doesn’t detract from the game–it just makes it hard to find the rules that you’re looking for.

(To be more specific about it, there are tables that seem to be in random places. The placement of Enemy AI actions is weirdly placed in the middle of the Missions section instead of, say, the Alien Creatures section. That whole Missions section is weird, as it jumps straight to Co-Op and Skirmish games, without every really giving an introduction to standard missions.)

But these are minor quibbles. Once you play the game for a while and get several fights under your belt, it’s no problem at all.

Majestic 13 Review Bottom Line:

This is a very solid entry to independent wargame rules. It is an improvement on previous Snarling Badger games Reign in Hell and Space Station Zero, both of which were very good.

My scoring is:
Lore: 9/10 — I really love the depth here.
Gameplay: 7/10 — Good and solid, but not perfect
Hobby: 6/10 — This is really an open world where you can do whatever you want with it. And there are plenty of models you could use here, especially from the Wargames Atlantic range.