🌻Slava Ukraini! Heroiam slava! Operation Spiderweb in IADS: The Game

It was after playing with an intel professional from HQ Air Force back in 2023 that I decided to incorporate the sUAS Swarm and Counter sUAS unit cards into the IADS (thanks, Molly!). As intel people, a lot of times we have a doom and gloom sense of the world, only looking at what adversaries might be able to do. Pleasantly surprised to see it was our Ukrainian partners, not any adversaries, that were the first to use this capability in combat; and to such great success! Operation Spiderweb FTW!

Here's how these capabilities work in IADS: The Game:

Everyone loves the way this card looks, so scary spooky! OooOOooo!

👾 sUAS Swarm

The sUAS Swarm unit card attaches to the HQ card in the Deploy Phase. From there, it has one special capability: Asymmetric Attack.

Much like the Special Operations' Infiltration, the sUAS Swarm may be placed on a suspected or detected enemy surface unit anywhere in the battlespace. It gets an immediate Detect against that surface unit, and all enemy surface units in the game receive -1 to their Defenses.

The idea here was to capture how these systems would already be in and around the battlespace and would all activate at once. Not having a large warhead, I didn’t originally include damage dice. But in light of Operation Spiderweb, I think it’d be awesome to add the following House Rule:

• Any enemy aircraft at any HQ at the time of sUAS Swarm Asymmetric Attack are destroyed.

  
  

💡 One clarification on the Attrition Points for sUAS Swarm: opponents only score these points if the Swarm is left unactivated on your HQ and the HQ is destroyed. Once used, the points are off the table, even if countered by the Counter sUAS.

"Wrbwrbwrbwrbwrb" -- that's the sound those little signals make.

🛡️ Counter sUAS

With its special capability sUAS Defense, this unit card represents a series of systems designed to protect against sUAS threats. Optionally passive, you may want to burn two actions increasing the Defense of all your surface units by one, even if there may not be a risk of a sUAS attack. After it's attached to your HQ in the Deploy phase, it

• Automatically prevents the effects of an attacking sUAS Swarm, and

• When activated, it adds +1 Defense and +1 Attrition Point to all friendly surface units.

Same note for the Attrition Points on this card, the "Attrition Points: 2" only takes effect if the Counter sUAS isn't activated from the HQ and the HQ is destroyed.

Unfortunately for Russia, they weren’t able to draft this card in time. Dang. That’s just too bad... Those poor Tu-95s... 💀

🕸️ Final Thoughts

Operation Spiderweb was awesome; here's to more broken Russian airplanes! 🍻 I'd love to have to keep making weird House Rules to account for the successes of our partners. Slava Ukraini! Heroiam Slava!

- Ric