Full Thrust, the way it was meant to be played

At GenCon last summer, I got bitten big-time by the spaceship wargaming bug. I demoed War Rocket and had a blast, but the pulp sci-fi setting didn't really resonate with me. I wanted more of a deep-space naval experience, kind of like Star Wars/Trek but without the added burden of a well-developed setting.

Enter Full Thrust, the granddaddy of spaceship wargames that's still going strong almost two decades after it was first published. The game is officially in its second edition (free on the Web) but a fan-made, creator-sanctioned PDF offers an updated representation of the game. It's called Full Thrust: Cross Dimensions, and it's also available as a free download.

The best part about Full Thrust is that players are explicitly encouraged to use any miniatures they want to assemble their fleets. There's an established universe for the game, and the publisher sells miniatures to go with this setting, but it's not essential for the playing experience. The creator notes several times in the rules that the game can be grafted onto any number sci-fi settings, including (of course) homebrew universes.

So, in true Full Thrust fashion, I assembled two mishmash fleets using miniatures from 4 different game lines and manufacturers. For smaller escort ships, I'm using the starfighters from Silent Death. For medium-sized destroyers and light cruisers, I'm using a handful of BattleTech/AeroTech miniatures. Heavy cruisers and battleships were drawn from Starfleet Battles and Firestorm Armada, both of which have some beefy, cool-looking ships.

To a casual player who's more familiar with branded miniatures games, my fleets might look like a mess. But to me they're a perfect example of the Full Thrust ideal: generic fleets composed of the various miniatures, painted up and ready to hit the battlefield (er, space-field?).

I'll make a little universe one day to go along with my fleets, but right now they're just the Gray Fleet and the Green Fleet. Original, huh?

We played our first game of Full Thrust the other night. Thankfully my opponent had played the game a time or two before, so between the two of us we were able to get up to speed quickly.


In Full Thrust, players plot each ship's movement on a piece of paper at the start of each turn. Then, all ships are moved at once. This puts players in the interesting position of trying to anticipate their opponents' maneuvers, and react accordingly. It's also possible that your ships will find themselves with nothing to shoot at because of your opponent's maneuvers. It took some getting used to, but by the second game I was really enjoying the movement system.

Combat is fairly simple, with most ships mounting huge banks of beam weapons, or various missile/torpedo systems. I'm told the combat resolution system inspired similar systems in Uncharted Seas and Firestorm Armada.

The deep space felt mat in these photos is from Hotz ArtWorks. It was a custom job, like almost all of his products, and it took about a month and a half to get to me in Chicago. But the wait was worth it...while playing at our local game store, about a dozen gamers wandered over throughout the evening to ask about our game, drawn solely by the gorgeous spectacle of two fleets exchanging volleys on the pretty felt mat.

The asteroids were pieces of lava rock mounted on flying bases, and the planet was a decorative bamboo ball I snagged from a hobby store. It looked great as a storm-wracked gas giant looming in the middle of the battlefield!

The 500-word campaign setting: Dust to Dust

Ben challenged me to hammer out a 500-word campaign setting. What follows is a little bit longer than that, and it's inspired by a few disparate sci-fi elements I've been chewing on lately: the recent Phoenix Lander Mars mission, the new Mutant Future D&D setting and my own musings about what might happen if a Traveller crew ever settled down somewhere. Feel free to let me know what you think.

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“Dust to Dust”

One hundred years from now, humans reached the stars, clawing hungrily into the heavens and leaving behind a cracked, ruined Earth. In the waning days of the n ext century, technological advancements ground to a halt as petty resource wars erupted on the planet’s blasted surface. Colonization was the only hope of a dying planet, and so various factions, guilds, governments and groups sped through the cosmos toward dozens of carefully mapped destinations.

These star systems, chosen by desperate scientists, offered the best hope of yielding up Earth-similar planets for colonization. Such was the urgency of the humans’ departure that the candidate planets were chosen based on telemetric data; no satellite observation was conducted. Years passed, and eventually the refugees’ massive fusion-powered spacecrafts arrived in orbit around their destinations. At that point, they were quite literally scattered throughout the galaxy without hope of ever contacting one another again. For all intents and purposes, each colonization ark was on its own, carrying in its swollen belly all the necessities for settlement: agricultural equipment, energy generators, prefab buildings and simple vehicles.

The human cargo, however, varied by each ship; some vessels launched with only a skeleton crew, hoping to birth and rear a new generation in transit. Others were full to the brim with the determined masses, each desperate soul willing to sacrifice everything for a chance at a new life. Still others made landfall after a plague or famine swept through the city-sized starship, leaving only a few grief-stricken survivors to begin anew.

As expected, the myriad planets the colonists found were largely inhospitable. Bereft of all but the hardiest life, these planets were wracked by dust storms and scoured clean by extreme weather and temperatures. Slowly, arduously, the exhausted colonists made landfall and unpacked their terraforming equipment. They had known this was coming; it was too much to hope that the planets might embrace their arrival with open arms. But no matter: The colonists were prepared to seize their future, to yank it from the dusty soil of their adopted home…

“Dust to Dust” is a campaign setting about terraforming efforts on a frontier world in the near future. Players and the GM should sketch out the specifics of “their” world – the environment, the geography, the weather, etc – as well as the look and feel of their colony ark. Was it a large ship that landed thousands of determined settlers over the course of many years? Was it a smaller relief vessel lacking some basic, important terraforming tool? Did half the colony crew die during a botched landfall attempt? Players should flesh out key characters and factions unique to their colony world as well. Influential families, corporations and organized crime could easily have taken hold in the burgeoning colony.

In game terms, the colony is assumed to be brand-spankin’-new, probably fewer than three months old. That way, the PCs are thrust immediately into the daily struggle for survival on the frontier world. Machinery breaks down regularly and replacement parts are in short supply. Political factions struggle for influence over the colonization effort, each convinced that they can help this tiny human toehold achieve sufficiency. Scientists make daily forays into the wastes looking for much-needed resources; some never return. At night, the masses huddle inside their prefab shelters and listen to an alien wind howl.

The most important character in the game is the planet itself and the mystery it represents. It can be both the savior and executioner for the squalid colony.