This Week’s post digs into the leftover bits and bobs of my miniature heap.
New challenge for 2025: Can you make an entire starter set style wargame box by raiding your leftover materials and spending as little as possible?
That's what I've tried to do with my latest Peg Project.
PEGS IN SPACE - A Void Admiral Starter Set
See, it fits!
SHIPS
Clearly inspired by the old Battlefleet Gothic starter set, I wanted to build two standard-sized fleets for Void Admiral as my Imperial and Chaos stand-ins. Each side gets a Galleon, two destroyers, two corvettes, a squadron of three frigates, and a few stands of fighters. Clothes pegs and cocktail sticks are all I need.
I tried to give each faction's ships a distinctive silhouette so that you can broadly tell who's on which side even before they're colour coded.
A bit of painting later and they're up to table standard, my favourite standard.
Later I'll add in a handful of extra ships for each side, allowing more variety for fleet building, and using up the leftover flight stands.
TERRAIN
You know what's the worst? Starter sets that don't come with any terrain. We won't be making that mistake. Void Admiral suggests quite a terrain-heavy battlefield, with five terrain types in the book. I wanted to include all of them in the box.
Debris fields are mainly a nuisance, usually chipping away at your shields. These were just gravel and sand drybrushed over black primer.
Gas clouds impede fire both in and out. I strung out some cotton wool, glued it down with some sand, applied sealant spray and drybrushed over black primer.
Asteroid fields are risky to fly through, doubly so at full speed. I used small polystyrene balls for these, roughed up, sprayed with sealant before priming them and drybrushing on top.
Large asteroids fully block movement and fire, destroying any ship that flies into them! Perhaps I should have gone bigger with these, but I still wanted them to fit into the box. I roughed them up, primed them before sealing, allowing the paint to melt away at the exposed parts, then drybrushed on top.
Navigational Buoys are used for scenarios. Mine ended up looking more like space stations or flying saucers, but they work.
That gives us enough options to make a nice interesting sector of space to fight over. Oh, and I bought the cheapest stretch of black cloth I could find.
Yeah, I should probably iron that cloth. I'd like to speckle some stars on there too.
THE COST
Okay so let's work out the damage:
Clothes pegs, wooden discs, round gem stickers (£5) I spent about £10 on these a while back, but used a fraction of them for this project. Even if I only count half the price I've still got plenty of material left if I want to add more ships, but that would mean I need more of the next item.
Flight Stands (£18) Annoyingly the most expensive part of the project, as I ended up needing two medium packs and two small packs from the Dropzone Commander range. I'm sure there's a lower cost alternative to this, but I drew a blank.
Black cloth (£6) for my space battlemat.
Cotton wool, gravel, sand, toothpicks, cardboard, round bases for fighters, box to store everything in (£0). I had these lying around, so I'm counting them as free.
Polystyrene Balls (£2.50). I got a bag of assorted sizes, using a handful of these for the asteroid fields and large asteroids, plenty left over for future projects.
The Rules (£8) I picked up a print copy of Void Admiral in print. PDF is cheaper but I prefer paper rules at the table. I'd also like to try One Page Rules' Warfleets or Billion Suns, which should both work just fine with the same box.
Counters (£0) the game calls for a couple of counter types, "sitting duck" or "sealed hatches" so I'm re-using some double sided netrunner tokens I have that will fit the bill. One side is red (sitting duck), the other blue (sealed hatches). The rulebook has a printable token sheet but I prefer something a bit more robust than paper. I'll be tracking shields and hull damage using dice.
Time (?) Naturally it takes a bit of time to build these ships and make this terrain but really none of it was strenuous. I've certainly spent longer assembling and painting proper starter sets.
So in total we're just over £40, with the caveat that I've got a bunch of spare pegs and polystyrene balls to use on future projects.
Not really the shockingly cheap total I was hoping for, but I blame that on the flight stands. If I were craftier I could have cobbled something together with wood, but then I do appreciate the luxury of transparent acrylic.
Overall, am I happy with £40 for a full two full-sized fleets with a proper battlefield to fight on? Absolutely.
Dig into your own scrapheap. There might be a starter set in there.
Elsewhere
The Novel Gamemasterhas some nice little inspirational hooks for Mothership characters.
MAC Attack now has a pre-launch page at Backerkit, so you can follow the upcoming launch.
Coming Soon
Over on Patreon I talk about what sort of technology exists among the stars.
FRAGS
Most power is drawn from the stars, stored in condensed stellar fragments, commonly called frags. These double as a universal currency for major transactions.
Expect the full post here and on the blog next week.
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