small battles - Miniatures Wargaming

This is really just another wargame period for me, but makes a nice change from "heavyweight" periods like Biblical and Vietnam. I am developing a game called "Borg Cube off the Starboard Bow!". The rules are still in progress and I will post them on the web-site when they are complete. In fact the game is likely to be an adaptation of Battlefleet Gothic from Games Workshop, in which case I will publish only the adaptations and not the core rules themselves.

Although I do not own a copy of Battlefleet Gothic, the work-in-progress rules were published in White Dwarf magazine many moons ago. The Games Workshop game is obviously based on naval battleship combat of the steam era, but lends itself very well to fighting between spaceships from the Star Trek fictional universe, probably because the creator of Star Trek also drew heavily on the naval ship analogy.

The reason for theming the game around Star Trek is simply this: I have a collection of the Galoob/Micro-Machines Star Trek toys, which are ready painted, come with stands and are prefect for wargaming. I was impressed with the Battlefleet Gothic rules published in White Dwarf, and decided that I would use these.

Initially, I wanted to create a realistic game of space combat and spent a lot of time investigating this, i.e. using known physics and reasonable projections of known physics into the future. The truth is, it's all but impossible to create a playable game, and at the end of the day, it's not what players want.

There is a popular commercial set of rules for space battle, but I consider them inferior to the Games Workshop product, and in any case there is one aspect of these rules which really annoyed me. Specifically, this is the pretence that they are realistic when in fact they are based on "Hollywood" space combat and it is clear that the authors don't know the first thing about even school-level physics. They actually misquote a basic law of physics to justify their movement rules, which actually fly in the face of the said law!

Anyway, below is a small taster of what is to come. This is a record card for a Klingon Bird-of-Prey. The format should be recognisable straight away to anyone who has played Battlefleet Gothic. As well as developing these record cards, I want to add event cards which will create a Star Trek flavour to the game, and deal with specific weapons like Cloaking Devices. Watch this space!