Homeworld Fleet Command board game promises huge fleet battles that won’t destroy an entire evening
Kharak open a cold one with the fleet.
There’s an official board game based on the Homeworld real-time strategy series, and it’s hoping to deliver fast paced combat using a huge number of ships and match lengths that don’t stretch the group’s patiences.
Homeworld Fleet Command is being developed by Modiphius, the UK-based studio responsible for Dune: Adventures in the Imperium, Achtung! Cthulhu and a number of licensed tabletop properties from Star Trek to Fallout and Skyrim.
Designers Nick Fallon and Chris Birch, who is also Modiphius’ chief creative officers, pitched video game developer Gearbox Entertainment on a board game that would deliver “massive fleet battles that can be played in an hour,” according to Sean Haran, the studio’s chief business officer. The press release certainly describes it as such, promising wide scale battles with one to four players filling the admirals’ seats.
The Kushan exiles and Taiidan Empire are both represented on either side of the board game's prodigious conflicts, and those players looking for a little narrative backbone in their tactical rounds can submerge themselves in a 10-scenario campaign that hits some high points in the video game series, such as Return to Kharak, Supernova Station and Tenhauser Gate.
The base game’s box will come packaged with 101 plastic ships ranging in size from fighters and corvettes all the way to Motherships and destroyers. The crowdfunding campaign will apparently also sell a launch expansion that adds another 100 more miniatures. The core set will come with both solo rules and variants for sharing command among three other players.
If your play group owns multiple copies, Modiphius says they can be combined to pull off some galactic warfare on a truly memorable scale. Whether the publisher’s sales pitch of fast and uncluttered gameplay holds up at that level is left an open question - that’s a whole tonne of plastic warships to manage.
Modiphius did not offer a set date for Homeworld Fleet Command’s launch date, saying only it would begin crowdfunding in the second half of 2022. This isn’t the first time the spacefaring video game series has hit the tabletop. In fact, Modiphius published a tabletop RPG set in the science fiction world back in 2019. Homeworld: Revelations uses the 2D20 system and gives players the narrative rope to tell stories from pretty much any point within the series’ history, all the way up to Deserts of Kharak.