First time playing A Billion Suns

A gunship destroys one of Barend's fighters.

During the holidays Barend and I finally had the chance to try out a project I've been working on sporadically for about a year: A game by Gaslands-writer Mike Hutchinson called A Billion Suns. 

In this science fiction wargame you battle it out as CEO's of multistellar companies, both trying to gain as much profit as possible from the contracts spread out on the table.  These contracts are effectively very elaborate mission objectives, spanning from customs patrols to industrial espionage. So, although it's technically a wargame, the profit comes first and the war comes second.

All ships and other miniatures are 3D printed. 

I took the files from different online locations, most of them come from wargamingvault.com.

You start every game without a single ship on the table, but you can buy and jump in ships freely at the start of every round. The catch is that the credits you use to buy the ships are also your victory points. Thus, if you spend to much on ships, you won't be able to break-even anymore and probably lose the game.

The game uses cards to determine the revenue earned from contracts.

All of the ships we used are 3D printed and painted by me. You can use any ships you'd like for the game as the system is miniature and scale agnostic. The cloth map was designed by me as well and has four sections, as A Billion Suns is played in multiple sectors in space. Your ships use faster than light jump points to move between sectors.

For a book this small (60 pages) the rules are quite complex, but luckily they are also well written. We had a lot of fun trying to outsmart eachother, carefully jumping in ships in the best positions. At one point I tried to sneak in a tiny ship to steal information from an independent station in a sector Barend wasn't active in, thinking I could get away with some easy cash. But Barend jumped his larger fleet from one jump point to another, completely surprising me and destroying my ship. It all feels very thematic. 

Barend's destroyer does a 180 and hits my corvette.

Another time Barend announced his destroyer was going to divert all it's power to inertia dampeners. Then, he swung the ship around 180 degrees and shot a railgun round in the broadside of my corvette, which was trying to destroy Barend's fighter squadron on the other side of the sector. A move that felt as if it came straight out of the Expanse. 

We played two games, both took about an hour and a half. Before the game starts players can decide on a scale, which determines the amount of revenue to be earned that game and, as a result, how many ships you'll probably be able to buy that game. We played a scale 5 and a scale 3 game, which we both found very enjoyable. The smaller scale game was just as tactically interesting, as we had to carefully consider every ship purchase. 

Fighters engaging Barend's utility ships.

A large utility ship is escorted by two fighter squadrons.

We both had a blast using questionable business strategies in the vast emptiness of space and we hope to get a campaign started in the future, which will of course feature on the blog.

Cheers,

Merijn