Homebrew Spaceship Game Rules Finally Finished

I stayed up waaaayyy too late last night, finishing my homebrew spaceship miniatures game, War In Space.  I've been excited to do an updated version ever since I purchased the rights to some cool artwork for the cover.  The cover (which is a separate file on my downloads page) features an illustration by artist Colin Hay, who painted many science fiction book covers in the 1970s, even having some of his works featured in the fabled Terran Trade Authority Handbooks!

I recently bought myself some Bristol board, nibbed pens, and a sable brush and tried my hand at inking a drawing; the final result is on page 1.  Wow, that's hard!  Just like they say in Chasing Amy, inking is far more than just tracing.  Once the inked drawing was done, I scanned it into my computer and created the starfield background using Microsoft Powerpoint.  That's right, Powerpoint.  I spent heaps of money buying my girlfriend Adobe Illustrator as a gift earlier this year, but as I don't have a Mac and she does... time to improvise.  Well anyways, it was my very first inking attempt so be gentle.

This version of the game features a reworked version of my multi-player campaign rules, which now feature a 3D campaign map.  The gazetteer of interstellar distances (or more correctly flight time in game turns) was created using a spreadsheet to do all the simple but tedious math.  If anyone is interested I'll post the file to my downloads section.  Just roll three percentile dice for a star system's X, Y, and Z axes and input it into the spreadsheet and the flight times to the other 14 systems appears in the colored table.

Honestly my push to get this done was to just get it out of my mind.  My gaming consciousness has been taken over by 10mm mass combat recently, and I've been focusing on playtesting a new set of rules called Count the Dead.  I've enjoyed the few playtest sessions I've had with this spaceship game, but really the rules were a vehicle to get some of my scratchbuild starship miniatures on the board.  With 10mm gaming I've been using commercial figures and brother, what fun!  I hope I can share my free rules for this genre as well.