Returning To The Seas Of Dystopian Wars

Long-time readers will remember that many years ago (when it first came out even) I dived into Dystopian Wars by Spartan Games. In the designers words...

The year is 1870.
The World is at War.
The world of Dystopian Wars is similar to our own but subtly different. The year is 1870 and the Industrial Revolution occurred decades earlier than in our own world. Technology is far advanced, and in many cases, unrecognisable, which has led to the development of fantastic naval vessels, hulking land ships and terror from the skies in the form of airships and war balloons.

Let's recap

• Ships
• Cool Technology
• Really Big Ships
• War Balloons?

Needless to say, it ticked many boxes for me and in no time had I picked up a small pile of ships and even painted up a decent chunk of them. The story gets a little less happy from here.... over the years the designers kept making outstandingly cool models, which I of course kept buying and stashing away. Unfortunately, I never played enough games to really bed the fundamental mechanics in my head and over the course of a relatively small number of years we saw V1, then V1.1, then V2 and subsequently V2.5 of the rules published. So, with a small number of games and so many improvements to the rules happening I ended up just putting the game (and the models) on the shelf. As I said I still kept picking up models along the way (very happy to have the Ice Maiden! above right) but without a whole lot of desire to do much more.

Unfortunately the story gets even worse here as a little over a year ago Spartan Games ceased trading. I was fortunate enough over the years to have traded a number of emails with the folks at Spartan and found them to be a great bunch of passionate people. Seeing the company close the doors was an obvious loss to those of us in the community as well of course to the staff that had poured their heart and soul into the business.

So this is where the worm turns a little. Warcradle Studios (a subsidiary of Wayland Games) bought the rights to Dystopian Wars along with some of the other Spartan Games properties. On a personal level this was great as it meant that the game would continue to live on but I still had very limited reasons to play or paint my models.

And now the happy ending... (for me that is). Recently an old colleague, and once again colleague, Victor, dusted off his old ships and challenged me to a game. Armed with the "new" 2.5 edition of the rules and the Fleet Action 'fast play' version we sat down to a game one evening. The Fleet Action rules are...

...the new fast play game engine set in the world of Dystopian Wars, which will allow you to take your existing forces and, with no change to what you already own, play a faster, leaner, deadlier game of the world's leading Victorian Super Science Fiction Wargame.

I'd say it is 90% of the best bits of the game, with only 10% of the complexity. Within 90 minutes we managed to fumble our way through a small game, but we got to use our ships for the first time in probably five years. Even though the rules abstracted a number of the ship details compared with the full game, they were all different enough that the flavour of the full game seemed to still be there and most importantly, we got to use our ships!

Time to dust off the old ships and perhaps start painted up some of the backlog?

Two fleets line up

The Battleships clash