Arms Race is a game on a forum I frequent, created by one of the members there. I figured I might as well post it here to see what the opinions here might be.
Basic Ruleset:
The players all play as a number of engineers part of one or more factions (typically two), that are creating new weapons for their factions. Gameplay is divided into three phases.
The Design Phase:
The biggest phase, where new technology is designed. Each faction only gets one design each phase. After a design is chosen by a faction, you will see the results of your design, based on a die roll and a difficulty which is assigned by the GM (see difficulty, below).
The Revision Phase:
An opportunity to fix problems or make changes to your existing designs. This works like the design phase, but the changes you can make are smaller (see difficulty, below). You can also attempt to reverse-engineer enemy designs, if you have gained ground in a theatre where the design which you want to reverse-engineer was fought.
The Battle Phase:
A summary of the fighting which demonstrates how effective the new equipment sets for each faction are, and the armies will gain or lose ground across a number of fronts with different terrain (ex. three fronts, one jungle, one mountain, and one plains) affecting the effectiveness of weapons. There exist a number of ways to determine the outcome of a battle, which will be explained later.
There exist some additional phases, but these are the core three phases that make the game work. Others include an ability to conduct espionage to steal or sabotage a design, reduce the cost of one item for one turn, choosing which fronts to attack on, conduct research to make future designs of some type become cheaper (will explain in later post), and others.
Stuff gets really long after this, so I'm going to cut this post here to prevent this from taking up an excessive amount of room. Next post will be on Expense Levels.