Hear from co-designer David Thompson about the process that brought our deckbuilding lane battler Line of Fire: Burnt Moon to life...
Line of Fire: Burnt Moon is a standalone game inspired by the Undaunted series, adapting the core deck-building gameplay to quick, elegant lane-battling.
In Line of Fire: Burnt Moon, a group of black-hat hackers known as POSIWID plots to hijack the moon Io and hold the entire Jovian power grid to ransom. Standing in their way are the ultra-corporate Lunar Frontier Authority (LFA), the constructors of the lunar energy facilities. Both sides have engaged a fleet of ROV – advanced remotely-operated robots — to battle across the treacherous landscape.
This is the story of how Line of Fire came to be...
Origin
The seeds of Line of Fire were planted in September 2021 during a meeting with Osprey Games. At that time Undaunted: Reinforcements was just releasing (having followed Normandy and North Africa in 2019 and 2020, respectively). The meeting was primarily focused on the development of Undaunted: Stalingrad, with initial conceptual conversations about Undaunted: Battle of Britain — but it was also during this meeting that Trevor Benjamin and I pitched our core concept for Line of Fire to Osprey.
The idea was simple but ambitious: Create a fast-playing, low-footprint, cards-only experience that distilled the tactical essence of the Undaunted series. The goal was a game that could live in a small box, be learned quickly, and hit the table fast — a tactical firefight with deck-building and no dice.
From the outset, we imagined a stripped-down wargame in which combat took place across multiple columns or "lanes" where units clashed and vied for control. Drawing inspiration from Courtney Allen's Up Front, Reiner Knizia's Schotten Totten (or Battle Line, etc), and Martin Wallace's Milito, we focused on a lean ruleset but sought to maintain the strategic depth that defined our past designs.
One other design inspiration was our own War Chest. That game was conceived as a distillation of Undaunted in a different direction — replacing the military units of Undaunted within an abstract medieval setting — but along with War Chest's abstract approach was the removal of dice as a resolution system for combat. That's something we knew we wanted from the start for Line of Fire: deterministic combat.
May 2022 – April 2023: Sculpting the System
Trevor and I have long wanted to create a card-only tactics game — something quick to learn, quick to play, and with the same tension and decision-making players love in Undaunted, but without a game board or dice. We wanted you to open a box, shuffle a deck, and be battling across a battlefield in just a few minutes.
So we asked ourselves: What's the simplest possible version of tactical combat that still feels rich?
As we conceptualized Line of Fire, this guiding principle led us to three pillars:
• Tight deck construction: Every card matters. There's no filler, no bloat.
• Tactical positioning: The game board is five "lanes", but how you control and contest those spaces creates endless possibilities.
• No dice, all decisions: Every action is resolved deterministically. If you lose a unit, it's because your opponent outplayed you — not because the dice turned cold.
We began active design work on Line of Fire in May 2022. The design took shape through rigorous iteration. One of the earliest challenges was preventing overly rapid victories due to early "rush" strategies — specifically what we call "rifleman rushes" in which a player will add as many riflemen to their deck as possible early in the game to gain an efficiency advantage in the race for gaining control through majority. We explored several solutions: placing initial riflemen directly on the board, altering how control was gained, and introducing VP thresholds to require more meaningful engagements.
Suppressive actions were added to enhance tactical nuance and mitigate deadlocks. Special units such as mortars and snipers were explored — powerful but fragile elements capable of breaking stalemates or inflicting heavy losses. Mortars initially suppressed entire columns, but this proved overpowered. We eventually refined them to offer selective but impactful suppression.
Meanwhile, the concept of fog of war (FoW) was adapted and refined. We retained the FoW mechanism to punish unscouted advances and maintain thematic cohesion with previous Undaunted titles. However, managing FoW without the spatial complexity of a board game required subtle balancing of movement rules, scout interactions, and deck manipulation.
Throughout this period, we continued tuning the initiative and strength values of various unit types. Engineers became a particular focus, often straddling the line between underwhelming and overly complex. Their roles shifted multiple times — from mine-layers to fortification specialists — until we found the right balance of utility and accessibility.
May 2023 – May 2025: Refinement, Focus, and Fire
The last two years saw the game crystallize into its final form. By mid-2023, we'd locked in the core systems: deterministic combat with position-based bonuses, tactical card play with lane control, and the same streamlined initiative-based turn structure that is so popular in Undaunted. Every card was scrutinized for utility — no deck bloat, no filler.
A major breakthrough came with the development of the "fortify" and "demo" mechanism. Engineers, previously bogged down by convoluted interactions, now had a distinct and clean purpose: deploying fortifications to improve defenses and majorities, while also using their demo action to remove fortifications and control from key tiles. This tied their abilities to meaningful board impact without excessive overhead. Mines were shelved — deemed thematically compelling but ultimately too cumbersome for the pace we wanted.
The focus on speed and clarity became paramount. We tested game length, grinding potential, and "degenerate" strategies extensively. Control became a race for lane dominance, while tactical plays involving suppression and positioning offered deeper strategy.
Retheming the Fight: From World War II to the Moons of Jupiter
Originally envisioned as a World War II spin-off within the Undaunted series, Line of Fire underwent a significant transformation as the project matured. When development of Undaunted 2200: Callisto began to establish a sci-fi subline within the franchise, it became clear that Line of Fire was the perfect candidate to expand this thematic universe.
With this shift in direction came a full thematic overhaul. Gone were the traditional rifle squads, scouts, and sappers. In their place emerged remotely operated vehicles (ROVs), battling for control of Io, Jupiter's volatile volcanic moon. The units were renamed to reflect this technological warfare:
• MOSS: Multiple Operations Site System. These are your general-purpose bots — the backbone of any ROV deployment. They're the spiritual successors to riflemen and the only units that can take control of lanes.
• xED: Extreme Environment Drone. These agile units, formerly scouts, are all about speed and intel. They help you avoid interference.
• DaCU: Development and Construction Unit. Derived from engineers, DaCU fortify sites and can demolish enemy defenses. They're your key to controlling — or disrupting — the battlefield.
• TIR: Trackless Incident Responder. Inspired by machine gunners, TIRs hit hard and specialize in suppression, using shock actions to turn off enemy ROVs at just the right moment.
Personnel cards are the human operators directing these ROVs from orbit, introducing actions like blast, overclock, and redeploy to reflect this layer of strategic command. Even the FoW mechanism evolved into interference, a narrative nod to the signal disruption and data corruption that can plague remote warfare.
We designed every unit and action to reinforce the story. Deploying a DaCU feels like bringing in a high-tech shield wall. Playing a strike action with your Decom operative to eliminate an enemy ROV across the map? That feels like cracking into a command uplink and erasing a robot from existence.
The factions also shifted: the ultra-corporate LFA, builders of the energy harvesting infrastructure on Io, faced off against POSIWID, a black-hat hacking collective whose ambitions were nothing short of galactic extortion.
The new theme did more than re-skin the game — it reinforced the core gameplay with fitting narrative tension. The battle for Io is a remote, high-stakes conflict fought through disposable machines and hard decisions, aligning beautifully with the abstracted combat, quick casualties, and relentless pacing of Burnt Moon.
Final Thoughts
Line of Fire: Burnt Moon is our tribute to tactical elegance. It fuses the deck-building DNA of Undaunted with the direct, strategic feel of lane battlers — a knife fight in a phone booth on one of Jupiter's most volatile moons.
Creating the game required balancing innovation with restraint. We embraced modular asymmetry, avoided unnecessary mechanisms, and built a ruleset that supports deep strategy in under thirty minutes. Throughout, our guiding light was elegance and replayability.
The machines are activated. Initiate combat sequence. The battle for Io has begun.
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Line of Fire: Burnt Moon is out now. Order today!
Find the rulebook, product photography and more over on BoardGameGeek.
Explore the rest of the Undaunted 2200 universe with Callisto.
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