Yesterday, I had the pleasure of getting a taste of W.O.I.N. in a custom science-fiction setting; that is, we played a flavor of N.E.W. Because nobody else was free, a friend GMed just for me; I was treated to first-person action! We played via Skype, and that was awesome.

We certainly did not explore all the rules or get everything right, but here are some impressions.

As a player

• W.O.I.N. feels a lot like Shadowrun 5E, only … faster? Neater? Maybe it is just that weapons are no stat orgies here, and that you roll fewer dice. We still have a d6 pool mechanic, though, so you get that “try to defend my handful of dice!”-feel.

  Also, skills can be combined with any attribute, so you do not end up with useless skills just because the corresponding attribute is low.

• I did not create my characters, but we talked a bit about the process. You have the fill-in-the-blank character definition I have come to appreciate in the Cypher System:

  [Name] is a [attributes] [job] who/with [stuff].

  In addition, you have career paths. You can mix and match careers in whichever way you please – this is how you can move one character from fantasy to sci-fi settings or the other way around. Moving forward careers influences your attributes, skills, special abilities, but also your maximum dice pool size and age.

  I think this is a very rich and flexible yet also predictable and clean system.

• This is the first time I have played with a battlemap. I do not think you can get around that with W.O.I.N. – combat is quite tactical! Some stats and therewith decisions depend on having more or less exact ranges and angles.

• Loved the tactical combat and the crunch that comes with it. Especially because we did close-quarter ground fighting and a starship battle in an asteroid field and we used the same rules for both.

As a GM

• The crunch is adjustable. In combats, you will execute lots of attack and defense rolls; characters come with fixed scores for these rolls (the average result). So, as a GM you can choose not to roll all NPC defenses and use a fixed benchmark, or you can choose to go all dice-orgy.

  Now, this technique can certainly be applied to many games. W.O.I.N. is the first game I have seen that makes it explicit.

• Characters have relatively few skills. In a given situation, you pick the attribute and skill that fit the challenge best and have the player roll with these two. That allows you to cover many situations.

• Is seems very easy to add (or remove) a couple of careers for your setting or campaign. The thus modified system should still work nicely.

• Spaceships have lots of stats. Wow. I don’t want to have to prepare many of those!

All in all, I had a blast and I am looking forward to more contact with the system! If you want to run a moderately crunchy game in one of the broad categories of settings W.O.I.N. has – fantasy, 80s action movies, science-fiction – it is definitely worth checking out.