Grimdark Future: Firefight

What is Grimdark Future: Firefight

Grimdark Future: Firefight is the sci-fi skirmish game from OnePageRules (OPR), created by Gaetano Ferrara. You need 10 to 15 models, and a game takes 40 to 60 minutes. The Beginner’s Guide sets it in “a war-torn sci-fi future” and says it’s played with 32mm miniatures.

The core rules are free and fit on two pages, with a Beginner’s Guide that walks through them with diagrams and examples. The current version is v3.5.1, from December 2025.

It’s the small-scale sibling of OPR’s Grimdark Future army game, which OPR lists at 30 to 50 models and 60 to 90 minutes. The two share a setting, the Sirius Sector, and Firefight is the sci-fi counterpart to Age of Fantasy: Skirmish. It’s a separate game from Warpath: Firefight, which shares the name.

How it plays

Alternating activations. Players take turns activating one unit each. Whoever finished activating first last round goes first in the next.
One action per unit. Hold (stand and shoot), Advance 6” and shoot, Rush 12”, or Charge 12” into melee.
Quality and Defense. Every attack is a Quality test on a d6, and each success is a hit. The defender rolls to block each hit against their Defense value, and every failed block is a wound. A 6 always succeeds and a 1 always fails.
Wound effects, not hit points. A model that takes wounds rolls a die and adds one per wound marker. A 1–5 leaves it Shaken, and a 6+ knocks it out. In a unit of several models, each wound just removes a model until the last one is left. Tough models only start rolling once they’ve taken enough wounds.
Fatigue. After charging or striking back, a unit only hits on unmodified 6s in melee for the rest of the round.
Objectives. Games run four rounds over D3+2 objective markers, and whoever holds the most at the end wins.
Morale. Once an army is down to half its units, every unit tests at the end of each round. Shaken units that fail again rout.

The second page holds the special rules (Ambush, Blast, Caster, Indirect, Stealth, Tough and the rest) and some optional moves for vertical tables: pushing models, jumping gaps, and taking damage when they fall.

How to start

Download the free rules. The game page has the core rules, the Beginner’s Guide, mission cards, campaign rules, solo and co-op rules, a Horde Mode, and tournament guidelines with a 2025-26 tournament pack, all free. The core rules also come in German, Spanish, French, Italian and Polish.
Build a list on Army Forge. OPR’s free web app keeps the latest unit profiles, so you don’t have to buy army books to play.
Get minis in whatever format suits you. OPR sells its minis as STLs on Patreon and MyMiniFactory, pre-printed in resin on Etsy, and as paper minis on DriveThruRPG, some of them free. The free Welcome Pack has STL and paper versions of Human Defense Force and Alien Hives units, two small urban terrain pieces, a ruler, and tokens.
Set up a table. The rules call for a 4 × 4 ft area with 20+ pieces of terrain, or something smaller as long as the armies deploy at least 24” apart. OPR suggests 200 points a side to start and 300 for a full match.
Want more rules? The Advanced Rulebook is $4.99 on DriveThruRPG.

Free vs. paid

The game itself costs nothing: core rules, the Beginner’s Guide, the extra modes, and Army Forge are all free. OPR makes its money from the paid Advanced Rulebook and expansions, and from miniatures and its Patreon. The Firefight expansions on OPR’s site are the Assault on Malhadra mission pack ($9.99), The Whispers Below narrative campaign ($4.99), and two Sirius Chronicles short story collections ($4.99 each).

OPR opened an open beta for the next version, v3.6, on 10 September 2026.