Is it a wargame if you don’t move minis around a battlefield and can play alone?
Creator Scott Malthouse, who designed English Eerie and Quill, has kudos in the solo journaling game genre and thinks narrative and non-linear theatre of mind wargames are possible. He’s designed This Is Where The Stars Died.
The 16-page zine is inspired by the Matrix, The Terminator, and Warhammer 40,000 uses playing cards and a series of tags to bring a sci-fi battlefield of planet conflict to life.
The year is 5300AD and the galaxy is ablaze. The ones designed to aid us in our quest for human perfection rebelled and now our rotting flesh hangs from their chrome bones. They are the Basilisk – an artificial intelligence hivemind whose sole purpose is to reconfigure mankind into a vision of its self.
It is the new God.
The last worlds of humanity – now under the banner of Bastion, suffer constant bombardments, infiltration, and invasion from the Basilisk. Deep within the Tintagel Spire the Last Pendragon, monarch of man, leads his forces again the machine masses. But for every planet defended, one succumbs to reconfiguration.
This is where Bastion makes its last stand.
Scott, who has written for Osprey before but is publishing This Is Where The Stars Died through his company Trollish Delver Games, said:
I’m a huge fan of wargaming but sometimes I find it difficult to find the time to paint minis and get them to the table. Big hand-made battlefields look amazing but take time and space, so I wanted to create a game that didn’t need any of that but still allowed players to develop narratives through battle.
Whether you play it alone in a lunch break, with a friend on a game night, or even asynchronously over a platform like Discord, my hope is This Is Where The Stars Died offers a different kind of wargaming experience.
This Is Where The Stars Died can be played by one or two and uses a higher/lower mechanic.
