Gundam Assemble: the wargame where one beam sabre costs you three rounds of silence

First round, first game. My RX-78-2 closes on a Zaku II, I pull the beam sabre, I roll my damage, pleased with myself. Then I have to pay: the Gundam's token moves three spaces down the track.

Three spaces means three rounds of waiting. In that time my opponent acted four times.

That is the idea Bandai built its box around, and I have yet to see anybody put it plainly: in Gundam Assemble you do not spend command points or orders. You spend time. Every action pushes your token along a ten-space track, and the prettier the move, the longer you stay silent afterwards.

Time as ammunition

The Timeline track sits beside the board. Ten spaces, half per player, one token per unit. Whoever sits lowest acts, resolves their activation, pays the cost, and their token lands further along. Then you look again for the lowest. That is the entire running order of the game.

The costs are printed in black and white. Sprint: 2 for two spaces. Energise: 2 for one Energy. Rescue a garrison: 2, and it scores 2 victory points. Attack: whatever the weapon costs, and that is where it turns nasty, because the weapons that hurt are exactly the ones that take you out of the game the longest.

The cruellest detail waits at the end of a phase. If your cost pushes you past space 10, you keep paying from space 1 onwards, which means your unit acts in the next phase instead. Firing the Zeong's mega particle cannon on round 8 puts it to bed until round 2 of the following phase. I made that mistake. There is no taking it back.

So at every activation the real question is not "will I hit" but "if I spend 3, who gets to act before I do". It is a tempo game wearing a miniatures game's clothes.

No tape measure, and the mood changes

Everything counts in hexes. Adjacent means the next space, range 2 means two spaces, and the board has elevation levels built from stacked cardboard platforms. Nobody argues over half an inch, nobody crawls under the table to check a line of sight. You point at spaces.

The dice are D10s and the results table runs to four lines: a 1 always misses, 2 and 3 miss, 4 to 8 hit, 9 and 10 are criticals. Each hitting die deals one damage, with no wound roll and no save behind it. Accuracy shifts the middle numbers and never touches the 1s, 9s and 10s.

Put another way: you can explain the combat system to somebody in thirty seconds and start playing. For a miniatures game that is rare enough to be worth flagging.

What went into the guide

Fifty-six pages, free, at the bottom of this article. The file is bilingual: the French half first, the English one from page 31, in the same PDF.

It is built from the Official Core Rulebook version 1.0, updated 28 August 2026, which exists in English only. That is also why every French term in the guide carries its English name in brackets: your unit cards and Tactics cards are in English, and no French edition has been announced for Europe.

The opening walks through setup step by step, how to read a unit card, and the vocabulary. The middle follows an activation in the order it actually happens: deploy, advance, pick your primary action, pay, roll. The end is built to stay open beside the board: the cost table, the Accuracy modifiers, the list of things you cannot do, the glossary, and a page that compresses a full round into nine lines.

Forty euros, six kits, and the gunpla catch

Starter Set 01 came out on 31 October 2026, at around 40 euros depending on the shop, 35 dollars in the United States. Inside: six Mobile Suits roughly 5 cm tall (RX-78-2, Char's Zaku II, Wing Gundam Zero EW, Epyon, Barbatos Lupus Rex and Vidar), 18 Tactics cards, 6 unit cards, a board, a cardboard terrain set, tokens, D10s, a handbook and two quick reference sheets. Two introductory scenarios are included. The base format is 3 against 3.

Deluxe Set 01, announced at around 120 euros for 9 November, goes up to thirteen miniatures and moves to 5 against 5 on a bigger board, replaying the battle of A Baoa Qu. The Expansion Packs, around 45 euros, are themed: one series or one unit type per box.

And here is the thing nobody says loudly enough: these are model kits. They arrive on sprues, you build them, and you paint them if you want to. Bandai leans into the gunpla connection to the point of selling a Paint Pack. If you are coming from the video games and have never held a hobby knife, budget an evening before your first game. That is not a flaw, it is the deal. But it is worth knowing before you invite somebody over for the same night.

The four mistakes everybody makes in round one

The guide lists twelve. These four turn up every time, and three of them cannot be undone.

Paying after rolling. The Timeline cost is paid when you announce the action, before you touch a single die. The other way round, you are cheating without meaning to.

Thinking Advance is your primary action. Advancing is free and comes on top of your primary action, up to three spaces. Plenty of beginners play half their turn without realising it.

Splitting a move in two to shoot halfway through. Not allowed. A move ends before any other action, and you do not set off again afterwards.

Saving your Command abilities for later. They are declared before the attack is declared. After that moment, most of them are dead weight for the turn.

One last piece of advice, the one that genuinely matters for a first game: take the units you like. The game mixes every Gundam series with no restriction, a Barbatos can cover a Wing Zero, and nobody is going to lecture you about continuity.

If you build your six kits this weekend and the Timeline still feels abstract by round 3, come and ask: there is a wargame channel on the InsertCoins Discord, and we share first paint jobs there too, bad ones included.