Solo Spaceship Miniatures Game: Greater Space Battles (New Version)

Example page

The newest version of Greater Space Battles (GSB) is available for free on my downloads page.

I've finally settled on a design for a spaceship miniatures game that I'm happy with.  It's specifically designed for solo play and most notably it is very specific to my tastes.  The game therefore requires a lot of hand-made "props" on the table, which involve a bit of construction time but help the game play much faster.

Of all my solo-play designs that have failed (most of them) and all that have succeeded (few), I've found the discriminator to be speed-of-play.  Although this newest version of GSB isn't exactly lightning speed, it's fast enough to avoid tedium, while remaining random enough for interesting solo play.

Here's the introduction paragraph from the 8 page rule set:


Greater Space Battles was first introduced in 2011 as an attempt at designing a solo spaceship miniatures game.  While initial playtesting showed that solo space battles could indeed be played, each new game revealed more areas requiring refinement.  The game presented here represents the incorporation of all these lessons learned over the last seven years.  Only the initial germ of the original Greater Space Battles remains; the game presented here contains mostly new concepts and is the same in name only.  Hopefully, the solo-player finds the new concepts a vast improvement over the old.

Please let me know if you have any feedback.

Scratchbuild Spaceship Miniatures: 4 July 2018 Edition

I'm preparing to post the latest iteration of my solo spaceship game Greater Space Battles here and rewriting the rules have inspired me to make a new spaceship design.

The ship is mostly pasta and measures about 45mm.

On the table with scratchbuild moon and planet

Extreme close-up to highlight my poor brush-work 

Scratchbuild Spaceship Miniatures: 15 Feb 18 Edition

Finished a new scratch build design tonight.  I really like this design and I used a new technique that allows me to duplicate the ship.  Tutorial will follow this weekend.

Scratchbuild Spaceship Miniatures (11 Feb 18 Edition)

A new scratchbuild completed tonight, plus some better pictures of the ones featured in my last post.

I'm not a fan of this design but I followed through and finished it to document the process.  I plan to do a new tutorial summarizing my newer methods.

Scratchbuild Spaceship Miniatures (28 Jan 18 Edition)

I decided not to title this as "Spaghetti Spaceships" as I normally do, since pasta was not used for the two finished pieces shown here.  Various pastas were used to create the general vessel shapes , which were then captured in an impression mold that was further detailed.

I'm very pleased with how these turned out.

Spaghetti Spaceships: 7 Aug 16 Edition

I constructed a new spaceship miniature to test out some new materials and painting/detailing techniques.  Overall I'm pleased.

Materials are various pastas, paper, toothpicks, and CA glue.  Basic craft paint and acrylic floor finish for color.  Instead of using a nasty spray-primer, I painted the ship with an initial white layer, using the same craft paint/floor finish ratio.  For spaghetti ships, this will be my new technique.

The flight stand was painted along with the ship.  It still requires a final black layer which I should've completed before the photo-session… the blue flight stand is distracting in the pics below.

Thanks for looking.

Need to paint the flight stand

Spaghetti Spaceships (Ezjobaal Class Strike Cruiser)

I hope to continue playtesting the complete overhaul of my solo tabletop space miniatures game Greater Space Battles.  If the games prove fun, I plan to write up all the changed rules over the holidays.

In anticipation of this playtesting, I've made some more scratch builds using the "assembly-line" method highlighted in a previous post.  The construction features pasta and CA glue as the primary building material with plastic bits added.  Total work time was maybe 3 hours with some Netflix distraction.

I tried a new technique that I am very pleased with…spray paint.  Of course, I've always used gray spray primer but then proceeded to brush-paint with acrylic craft paints.  Painting by brush always left my spaceship miniatures looking terrible.  The uniformity of the spray paint really appeals to me, even though I will dry-brush these to highlight the details.  If it turns out well I'll share those pics too.

Didn't prime the lead ship… it shows

Needs dry-brushing and a painted base

Spaghetti Spaceship Assembly-Line

I spent a good deal of time and brainpower trying to replicate individual copies of my spaghetti scratchbuilds using traditional mold and cast methods.  Then I realized I was going about it all wrong.  Why not just create multiple copies simultaneously with meticulous measuring?

I tried it this weekend and am generally pleased with the assembly-line approach.  The ship design itself is just OK.  I like certain aspects about it but I ended up getting lazy and not adding enough detail.  Too many longitudinal lines and not enough lateral ones like the last ship.

Now if I can just figure out how to paint these things.

Pasta and CA glue; sprayed with primer

Raw pasta

Worst paint job ever

Spaghetti Starships WIP Update 25 May 15

I'm continuing to refine my pasta-based technique for spaceship miniatures.  I've learned to turn them out faster as well as discovered some interesting new pasta shapes that look even more artificial.  I've also figured out an easy and consistent basing technique using these little plastic discs found in food packaging.

Out of all the techniques presented on this blog, the spaghetti technique seems to yield ships with the most appropriate appearance of scale.  I've therefore decided to focus my efforts on making fleets of these little guys.  Unfortunately my attempts at making a mold of a previous pasta-vessel failed; since these ships are so inexpensive and easy however, I will just make each one a unique design.

The one thing I'm still working on is painting them.  While gray looks great, I do want some more variation.  I'm continuing to experiment with inks but for my next ship I might follow Desert Scribe's techniques and dry brush over black primer.

Materials: pasta and cotton swab stems

  

45 mm long

Happiness is Scratchbuilding (Spaceships)

Work has kept me on the road through all of April, leaving me little time to satisfy my creative urge.  I've barely had time to check other people's blogs, let alone finish the series of posts on my 1/600 solo jet game.

I finally got a weekend with two full days uninterrupted by any trips to or from the airport.  Instead of continuing any of the dozen or so projects I've started but not finished (giant monster sculpt, boxer sculpt, Marvel Super Heroes RPG cards…the list goes on) I went back to the security of the familiar.  I made another scratch build spaceship!

I went back to my roots and made this one out of spaghetti, as well as toothpicks, very thin sheet styrene, and some other materials for the domes.  Unlike any of my old spaghetti ships however, I will not use this one for impression molds.  I like it so much, I plan to make an Alumilite RTV rubber mold of the ship directly and then cast copies in resin.  The pictures here show the master primed; I plan to let it sit for 24 hours to make sure the primer is really dry and an effective barrier between the spaghetti and RTV rubber.

59mm long

Bow is left in picture; stern is right

Outsourced Custom Space Hex Mat

4' x 4' vinyl; 1.5'' hexes; US$35.00 

If you've read this blog you know I've made a couple of attempts at hand-painting a hex pattern on my DIY space mat.  I'm not admitting to being a quitter, but let's just say I took an extended tactical pause on both of those attempts.

In the meantime I used a custom vinyl banner company to make me a hex mat for 1/600 scale jet combat.  Since that turned out so well, I decided to employ the same company (Build-A-Sign) to make me a space mat.

As before I took an internet image (NASA public domain) and put it in Powerpoint on a custom 48 inch by 48 inch slide.  Powerpoint's built-in shapes allowed me to create the hex overlay; I colored the hexes blue and set the transparency at 85% (I think).  Since the NASA image was humongous, it had enough dpi to survive the blowing up to 4 foot square with minimal blurring.  Unlike my air combat mat which has 1 inch hexes, the hexes here are 1.5 inch each.

What I really like about the mat (besides the $35.00 price tag), is how subdued the hex pattern is.  The pattern shows up much easier in the picture above than in person.  Close-up at the game table the hexes are visible enough to allow game-play, but from across the room the mat looks like an expanse of deep space.

I've retooled my game Greater Space Battles and hope to get some play testing in on this new mat.  If work allows...    

Hand Carved Spaceships

…Or "Spaceships in my Backyard"

I've always thought spaceships should have curves to them.  The ships that really inspire me are those from the science fiction book cover illustrations of the 70s.  Unfortunately most of the miniature ships I make are blocky, due to the limitations of the construction methods.

All of the bad weather has left a bunch of fallen branches in our yard, including some nice straight tulip poplar pieces.  I've read poplar is good for carving so I figured, what the heck, I'll give it a try.

I've certainly not produced a work of art, but I'm strangely drawn to this ship design.  It's spartan in detail, but as I've noted on this blog before, the panel lines my other ships display are totally inappropriate for the scales they supposedly represent.

The true measure of the design will be apparent after I mold the wooden master and cast replicas in pewter or resin.  Obviously in order to make it look like a 300 meter long star-voyaging vessel and not a whittled toy, I'll need to get the surface extremely smooth.  I've used 120 grit sandpaper and got the ship feeling buttery smooth, but the woodgrain is still very apparent, as the picture below shows.  My previous experiments with wood revealed however that three coats of wood glue should make a shiny, plastic-like shell that I can sand down even smoother.

I'm ordering some Alumilite HSIII silicone in order to eventually make those molds.  I've found 10:1 RTV silicone to be temperamental in the cold months however, so while I wait for Spring to come I'll have a little time to carve a squadron or two.

~50mm long