A Tale of VIII Painters: Ray Part 6 - Dystopian Wars

Dystopian Wars is a game I dearly love, with visually interesting models and a great theme - its factions span the usual world powers that one would expect from a steampunk game (with some unusual additions like Australia, Canada, Poland and Belgium among others) but also include among their number the Covenant of Antarctica - possibly the most interesting in flavour terms. Within the setting, they represent an alliance of scientists who initially discovered the super-technology that started the world war, and now try to make amends by waging a campaign against everyone else - fighting to try and restore peace. It's a fairly standard kind of sci-fi set up but one which stands out in a game that's mostly alternate history.

Britannia Rules The Waves! An Introduction to Dystopian Wars

Naval combat wargames that are not historicals or space games are tricky to find; this is perhaps because the nature of naval warfare is not immediately interesting in game terms. Ships are slow, hard to manoeuvre and armed with more weapons than most games can simulate, most of which shoot things from ranges far beyond what tabletops allow. Games Workshop's Battlefleet Gothic, a broadsides-and-cannons game at its heart with a space flavour added, used a kind of non-scale; ship models were huge but simply a flavourful abstraction with only the base of the model actually representing its position. This was a theoretically good compromise but one which made moving models around terrain difficult at times.