Other Miniature Skirmish Games

[TedW 117]

G'day!

I've been an avid fan of the X-Wing game for quite a long while now, but I'm wondering whether anyone here knows of any other miniature/board games out there with a similar concept?

I'm mainly looking for small-scale skirmish games with 1 to 10 pieces at most per side (each piece being preferably customizable to some extent or at least having varied roles; an ffa mode like Aces High is also acceptable) with gameplay based around tactical positioning and navigating pieces through a small-scale field (squares, hexes, open spaces - doesn't matter). After my foray into wh40k, I'm quite deterred from playing larger-scale battles with dozens of miniatures on each side, so a compact mode with relatively fast gameplay is my preference here. As far as setting goes, it makes no difference to me whether it's a known property or not and whether you control human-sized beings, mechs, starships or whatever else - I'm just looking for a game similar in the aforementioned concepts of X-Wing.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions, cheers!

[GhostOfAFlea 24]

For the very similar, Wings of Glory is pretty fun, the WW1/WW2 equivalent of x-wing, with slightly weirder movement and rules for attacking from heights. I've only played the starter sets, but from what I can see, there are rules for bombers and more specialised fighter roles which look pretty cool, if complicated.
Otherwise if you don't mind spending hours making loads and loads of terrain, and you can actually find someone to play with, Corvus Belli's Infinity is pretty good. Cover is super important, and most games revolve around scoring objectives as opposed to just murdering the other team. Oh, and the rules for activation are super fun; you get basically one activation per dude, but you can distribute them however you want, so if you had a TIE swarm, for example, in infinity you could give every TIE one movement, or just have Howlrunner take like 7 turns in a row.

[TedW 117]

13 hours ago, GhostOfAFlea said:

For the very similar, Wings of Glory is pretty fun, the WW1/WW2 equivalent of x-wing, with slightly weirder movement and rules for attacking from heights. I've only played the starter sets, but from what I can see, there are rules for bombers and more specialised fighter roles which look pretty cool, if complicated.
Otherwise if you don't mind spending hours making loads and loads of terrain, and you can actually find someone to play with, Corvus Belli's Infinity is pretty good. Cover is super important, and most games revolve around scoring objectives as opposed to just murdering the other team. Oh, and the rules for activation are super fun; you get basically one activation per dude, but you can distribute them however you want, so if you had a TIE swarm, for example, in infinity you could give every TIE one movement, or just have Howlrunner take like 7 turns in a row.

Thanks a lot for the recommendations! I'll be sure to check those two out

[fantomenos 49]

Sticking with the same IP and the same company, I've been going through an Imperial Assault campaign with 4 other players and really enjoying it. The campaign is 1 against many, with the Imperial player taking on the 4 Rebel heroes, but there is a skirmish mode which I've heard good things about...

[TasteTheRainbow 8,726]

Battlestar Galactica: Spaceship Battles is pretty solid if you can find people to play with.

[Force Majeure 4,108]

If you haven't heard, SW Legion now has rules to play Skirmish on a 3 x 3 board Ala X-wing.

There's also the new Marvel Crisis Protocol and last summer there was Monsterapocalypse.

Three games I've been eyeballing recently  are Gaslands, Rangers of Shadowdeep and Frostgrave. Gaslands is super cheap to get into I hear (just use Hotwheels™ or Matchbox™ cars) and the last two are fantasy based and you can pretty much use any miniature model you like.

Edited November 22, 2019 by Force Majeure

[Imperial Advisor Arem Heshvaun 9,498]

 

Here is The Battle of Hoth.

Have fun.

 

[Forgottenlore 9,838]

I’ll second Monsterpocalypse. Super cool gameplay, unlike any other that I know of.

[TedW 117]

23 hours ago, TasteTheRainbow said:

Battlestar Galactica: Spaceship Battles is pretty solid if you can find people to play with.

I'm actually ordering the starter pack after I saw a few posts on this forum, and the rulebook got me really curious^^

[That Blasted Samophlange 6,923]

On 11/22/2019 at 4:12 PM, TasteTheRainbow said:

Battlestar Galactica: Spaceship Battles is pretty solid if you can find people to play with.

I did make a functional cylon raider AI, you can find it on the facebook group or boardgame geek, so it can be played single player if desired.  
 

 

Edited November 23, 2019 by That Blasted Samophlange

[That Blasted Samophlange 6,923]

1 hour ago, TedW said:

I'm actually ordering the starter pack after I saw a few posts on this forum, and the rulebook got me really curious^^

The Battlestar game had a playstyle I prefer over x-wing, but has an issue that the license is more limited.   You won't get anywhere near the variety of ships.   But, the game scales up player wise better.   Each player can play a single ship and you can do several players on a side. 
 

I've also picked up Marvel Crisis Protocol, and look forward to giving that a try.   It has, I think, 5 characters per side.   So if you have your favourite characters, to play, that can work for you. 

[kris40k 4,541]

https://aeronautica-imperialis.com/

Quote

After my foray into wh40k, I'm quite deterred from playing larger-scale battles with dozens of miniatures on each side, so a compact mode with relatively fast gameplay is my preference here.

If you liked the 40k theme, but just wanted a  small scale skirmish version, there is Kill Team.

Privateer Press also has Company of Iron which takes Warmachine/Hordes and turns it into a small-scale (6-12 minis per side) skirmish game.

Edited November 24, 2019 by kris40k

[LTuser 339]

9 hours ago, That Blasted Samophlange said:

The Battlestar game had a playstyle I prefer over x-wing, but has an issue that the license is more limited.   You won't get anywhere near the variety of ships.   But, the game scales up player wise better.   Each player can play a single ship and you can do several players on a side.

Galactica has never really had that many different ships (Fighter scale wise) compared to SW..

On 11/22/2019 at 4:08 PM, fantomenos said:

Sticking with the same IP and the same company, I've been going through an Imperial Assault campaign with 4 other players and really enjoying it. The campaign is 1 against many, with the Imperial player taking on the 4 Rebel heroes, but there is a skirmish mode which I've heard good things about...

One of the guys i do SW d6 (west end games) with, at conventions TRIED to get me into imp assault, CAUSE part of the goal of the game if you're running it IS (as the imperials) TO KILL the characters...

[TedW 117]

11 hours ago, That Blasted Samophlange said:

The Battlestar game had a playstyle I prefer over x-wing, but has an issue that the license is more limited.   You won't get anywhere near the variety of ships.   But, the game scales up player wise better.   Each player can play a single ship and you can do several players on a side. 

That's actually what got me interested in it in the first place, having a single heavily-customized ship with more complexity to maneuvers. Whether it's better or worse is a matter of taste I guess, and I realize it might get boring after a while (I'd need to do some playtesting with my friend first), but the sole idea seems novel enough for me to give it a try

Also thanks for the AI recommendation, sounds interesting 

[That Blasted Samophlange 6,923]

3 hours ago, TedW said:

That's actually what got me interested in it in the first place, having a single heavily-customized ship with more complexity to maneuvers. Whether it's better or worse is a matter of taste I guess, and I realize it might get boring after a while (I'd need to do some playtesting with my friend first), but the sole idea seems novel enough for me to give it a try

Also thanks for the AI recommendation, sounds interesting 

I'm hoping to do a campaign for Battlestar at some point, but with work, school, and overall dealing with depression, it is hard.  In a related note, I am hoping to do an improved version of the AI - using dice rolls, for a bit more randomization, but again, similar issues above.   
 

Now that heavy raiders and raptors are out, I want to do the basic AI for the Heavy Raider, and set some basic mission ideas down.  

Edited November 24, 2019 by That Blasted Samophlange

[TedW 117]

2 hours ago, That Blasted Samophlange said:

I'm hoping to do a campaign for Battlestar at some point, but with work, school, and overall dealing with depression, it is hard.  In a related note, I am hoping to do an improved version of the AI - using dice rolls, for a bit more randomization, but again, similar issues above.   
 

Now that heavy raiders and raptors are out, I want to do the basic AI for the Heavy Raider, and set some basic mission ideas down.  

I feel you on managing work and depression struggles - be sure to take as much time as you need and not rush it

The biggest reason Battlestar interested me is the fact many mechanics reminded me of several similar ideas I implemented in my big X-Wing system conversion for use in tabletop Star Wars RPG campaign. No system out there was appealing enough for me and since I knew X-Wing extensively, I decided to adapt some mechanics to make them usable in RPG-like combat encounters  Apart from the new turn-based mechanic, the biggest similarity was possibly the implementation of Speed system, marked by a d6 die next to each miniature. There were no planning and revealing maneuvers steps, so each ship had a Speed stat, they could accelerate or decelerate by 1 to 2 points (the latter strained the ship, no change in Speed removed strain instead) and then the ship resolved a maneuver from their (now custom) dial matching current Speed. I noticed the same vibe of building up and managing momentum with Battlestar's kinetic energy system, so now I can't wait when the game ships to see how it works out in practice  The altitude mechanic is also something I was going to implement, although the idea was to mark altitude with 1-3 pegs instead of a token (which probably would slow down the game by needing adjustments on a miniature each time). If I happen to have some determination to put the rules together (and they're massive, about 20 A4 pages scattered around in various files), I might someday post it here should people be interested in it^^ Although at the moment I'm mostly sticking with newer projects in hopes maybe something could be actually published in the future

[Cerebrawl 746]

On 11/24/2019 at 2:56 AM, kris40k said:

If you liked the 40k theme, but just wanted a  small scale skirmish version, there is Kill Team.

Or Necromunda. On the fantasy side there's Mordheim and Warcry.

[Hiemfire 7,292]

21 minutes ago, Cerebrawl said:

Or Necromunda. On the fantasy side there's Mordheim and Warcry.

They're supporting Necromunda and Mordheim again? I thought support for those was dropped almost a decade ago.

Edited November 25, 2019 by Hiemfire

[Cerebrawl 746]

16 minutes ago, Hiemfire said:

They're supporting Necromunda and Mordheim again? I thought support for those was dropped almost a decade ago.

They can still be played.

[Forgottenlore 9,838]

3 hours ago, Hiemfire said:

They're supporting Necromunda and Mordheim again? I thought support for those was dropped almost a decade ago.

They’ve been relaunched. Necromunda has, at least, I think the fantasy version isn’t called Mordheim anymore, the old world having been destroyed.

All new plastic miniatures for the various gangs, but the terrain isn’t as vertical, and there is much less of it in the new starter box. Don’t actually know how different the rules are from the original, kinda a lot though, I think.

 

Theyve actually brought back a lot of the old specialist games. Necromunda, Blood Bowl, Adeptus Titanicus, a new incarnation of Warhammer Quest, Aeronautica Imperialist. Plus a few brand new board/mini game hybrids, like the aforementioned Warcry, Warhammer Underworlds (the new Mordheim?), Kill Team as a separate game.

[LTuser 339]

I am surprised i see folks these days, playing Blood bowl..

[Forgottenlore 9,838]

1 hour ago, LTuser said:

I am surprised i see folks these days, playing Blood bowl..

From what I have gathered, BB is what got them to resurrect all these old specialist games. They redid BB a few years ago as a sort of side project and were blown away by how much it sold, so suddenly plans changed and they decided to push out teams in plastic instead of resin, and the planned relaunch of Adeptus Titanicus got delayed for a few years while they redesigned the new titans for plastic, and so on.

[LTuser 339]

I've heard that before.  And if true, GREAT..

 

Now, if they could do a version of Armada, for Stargate, that would be sweet!

Edited November 26, 2019 by LTuser