Steampunk's blog,

What about Steampunk this week?

Well I'm glad you asked reader !

      I skipped my weekly meeting at our beloved Ford building coffee shop off of SE Division and eleventh tonight because yard work made me unsuitable for friends. And after a shower I wast too tired to be getting back onto the bus that brought me home and slogging over. I was missed they said,
which is very kind to hear. But Sometimes you just need to be alone, with your ships and a friend on Skype while you blow up other people driving ships via the internet.

     Tangentially this is related to my topic of "Steampunk this week" because I want to talk to you about a great game we learned about at the second to last SteamCon we attended years back. It was called "Leviathans, Monsters in the Sky" and it was produced by Catalyst games if I recall

 ( http://monstersinthesky.com/ ). You were basically Pre-WWI Nation's ships, given the power of aviation through reverse magnetic forces. ( Yes. Now stop thinking about it and just enjoy the rest )

It was a Hex-map, turn based fleet combat / encounters game, The starter box was expensive at $100 but was large, full color and completely ready to play! You had a British starter fleet and a French Starter fleet. The British had longer range guns, heavier armor and much slower and less maneuver than the French counter parts. The French, light armor, slightly inferior range guns were off set by significantly faster ships, better turning and in many cases torpedoes. *Which anyone knows are death to whatever they can catch.

      This game was a fun, fairly quick to use and very imaginative way to have fun with naval battles and alternate history style science fiction settings. As I said; full color, fully assembled and ready to play. All the models were set into a pair of holders with water proof color ship cards that were dry erase compatible! Each ship had a battle card ( a reusable character sheet in effect ) and a note card which was lore based data and there was a back story / flavor text book to go along with it. There were two sets of rule books; the simple beginner's guide and the full rules with elevation, wind and clouds as well as different scenarios you could play too. It had double sided map boards so you could mix it up a bit. 

     Now, we bought this about three years ago? And it was after a bit of convincing on my part because the cost was Sunday morning "how much money do we have left?...Well this game we've been playing for hours and hours; it's on sale at that table you see.,"

     Long story short we got the money out and bought a starter set, and played it a lot. Sometimes every ship in both fleets had a single person driving it which was in may ways very life like. Someone on each team gave orders or Strong suggestions ( usually the battle ship drivers ) and everyone else tried to keep to the plan. After a while we had a second and then third fleet set and would launch into real fleet actions with twelve or more ships on each side into flotillas and squadrons. It was great fun, and a lot of hilarious panic stricken moments in game.

      At some point they released an extended set with a British and a French supplemental fleet boxes which contained another set of finely made ships ( one fleet or the other ) and another set of ship cards which represented "New additions to the fleet".
 There were some online representations for test ships of German and Italian fleets too, but for some reason were swallowed up and then lost despite public tests at conventions I heard about.

     The fleet expansions were about $35 to $50 depending on store / sale-holiday specials, and were regarded as being very much a desirable thing to have. The new ships were handy and offered some chance of catching your opponents off guard for a while, if you didn't have the cards out to show everyone ( until you started shooting *This was a house Rule we enacted to keep the feel and mystery of "random encounters" ).

      Further adding to the potential for this game: There were even more optional vehicles listed as "Light Cruisers" and "Armored Cruisers" which you could print the cards off and use existing models for! We used them several times and they did in fact add more layers and often hilarious surprises to the game play.

Now comes the sad part, You see despite all of the things they did right with this game it seems they were tragically doomed from the start. The story we heard was as follows.
 In order to make the game as high quality as they wanted, as cheap as they could to keep the price near reasonable and have it done quickly; the company had it all done in China. Great, lots of places do this. There were some problems early on with production quality and that got sorted out. Now at some point there was a problem with the factory and we heard it was that they were holding out for more money. I heard rumors but never got around to investigating that there was a KickStarter' campaign to help raise money for the second run of the game and financially it was a success which is why the development team moved forward with two new nations. 

  (     Keep in mind all of this is Con'talk and scuttlebutt ) 

I do not know what eventually killed this game but looking at their website; the link I provided above, there haven't been any new posts in just over a year.
None of my state's game stores when contacted had a copy of it, and it was about a year or year and ahalf ago when we bought the last two sets from a local store and one off of Amazon.

If you can find a copy ( or two, or three ) and the price is right. I strongly advise you to get this game it is quite a bit of fun and if you have some math heavy friends you can create new ship cards which are fair and balance out well enough. The story world was amusing, reasonably easy to follow since it had nothing to do with actual game play but reminded me of another Steam-Diesel punk game I loved about flying vessels and aerial battles.

      This game world had a lot of out of the table top / out of box potential for RPGs and online comic or short fiction stories to buy and collect. The ships were very much characters in the game with a rich and interesting history attached to each one so that it felt singular and special.

If you can find one, I hope you get it and play it and enjoy the heck out of it. Chances are we'll never see it again.