Your big brother has the tan army. You have the green one. The rug is the battlefield, the toy town is the objective, and every painted wooden house on it can come down.
Plastic Front is a destructible tactics game played with classic plastic army men. Pick your squads from a card hand, set them down, tell each one what to do — then press FIGHT and watch your plan meet his.
- Riflemen go cover to cover and lob grenades through windows. Snipers lie flat and wait. Mortar teams drop bombs on anything a friend can see.
- Engineers plant dynamite on walls and tanks. Bazooka teams hunt armour. The tank takes a floor out of a house with every shot. The battle robot from the eighties shrugs off rifle fire from the front.
- Every unit says what it beats and what beats it. Read their line-up, then answer it.
Every house is built from blocks, floor by floor. Blow the ground floor out and the whole thing folds onto whoever was hiding inside. A sniper in a window is a job for engineers — or for the tank. What falls down stays down for the rest of the match, so the town you fight over in round three is not the one you started with.
- Give every squad an order before the fight: ATTACK, HOLD a patch, walk a ROUTE round the side, or COVER the tank.
- Two orders a round once it starts — keep one for when it goes wrong.
- The best moment of every round plays back as a replay, in slow motion over the losses. Then the STATS sheet shows who really did the damage.
- Your brother plays a different plan every round, and answers what you did last time.
Once a round you can call in the kid's hand. Drop THE BOOK on a knot of figures. Put down a BLOCK WALL for instant cover. Send THE EXPRESS down the train line. Flood the bathroom floor with a bath bomb. Every table has its own calls.
- The Toy Town — a painted wooden town on the playroom rug.
- The Train Set — the attic floor, a wind-up express and a tunnel through a paper mountain.
- The Kitchen Table — cereal boxes, mugs and a toaster that fires toast.
- Lights Out — the bedroom floor after bedtime: only what the torch shows can be seen.
- The Sandpit — the back garden, a sandcastle and the garden hose.
- Bath Time — the bathroom floor, rubber ducks and a rising tide of foam.
And somewhere in the garden waits THE BIG ONE: a remote-control tank that dwarfs anything in your toy box.
- BOOT CAMP: eight short drills that teach every order and every call on a table of their own.
- Daily Battle: the same reinforced line-up for everybody today, scored.
- Gauntlet: board after board against a bigger army every stage, until you lose one.
- Veterans who survive carry their stripes into the next round.
