The tight rules and gorgeous miniatures of Star Wars X-Wing brought thousands of new players into the miniature wargaming hobby, but its tumultuous second edition and sad shutdown have left former players stranded. If you want a new way to use a collection of X-Wing miniatures – or indeed, any set of small-scale spaceships – then you should watch out for Void Fighter, the upcoming wargame ruleset from Casey Garske, creator of indie smash Space Weirdos. In this interview, Garske tells Wargamer about the depth of his love for Star Wars and all the ways its iconic dogfights inspired his new game.
Garske isn't shy about his inspirations – Void Fighter began life as a homebrew Star Wars board game called Snub-fighter. "If you look at production notes from Return of the Jedi, someone drew a speed comparison chart for all the different Star Wars ships", Garske says. "I bet I could write an entire game just using this speed chart and what I know about the weapons of these different ships", he recalls – and he was right.
The game has been in the works for a long time – he started on it "about nine years ago". Star Wars X-Wing was massive back then, making brilliant Star Wars spaceship models readily available, but as Garske says, it was "a Fantasy Flight Game [with] a ton of extra cruft around" the excellent minis. He thought: "maybe people would want a game [without] having to go to the store and buy a new pack of cards".
Void Fighter is also designed to scale up to more figures than X-Wing. Forces can range from four extremely tooled out ships up to a swarm of sixteen light fighters, numbers he based on the movie dogfights. To save money when playtesting, he "started ordering Star Wars Micro Machines off of eBay".
The original design was shelved after "three or four iterations". During COVID he got the itch to write a skirmish game, and went back to his notes. He stripped out the original movement system from Snub-fighter – which involved a hex grid – "and just used the ascending and descending dice mechanic that I was using, and that totally worked". That became the very successful Space Weirdos.
Space Weirdos was a self-published hit, and Garske followed it up with the equally popular Sword Weirdos. After that, "I took what I learned from Space Weirdos and Sword Weirdos and put all that back into Snub-fighter", Garske says. YouTuber Tabletop Minions has a great video about Space Weirdos which explains the core systems, which you can watch here:
Void Fighter retains the Weirdos games' simplicity. It uses the same five inch sticks for measuring range and movement, but adds a simple rule that figures can make one 90 degree turn per move they execute. It isn't X-Wing's detailed maneuver planning system, but it does make for quick gameplay.
Ships in Void Fighter are represented with simple stat blocks, and you can determine quite a lot just by looking at them. "You've got your speed, which is how many sticks of movement you have", and "your defense, which is based on which class of spaceship it is". A piloting stat is used to pull off special maneuvers, while each equipped weapon has its own firepower stat. Then a variety of upgrades let you tailor ships further.
While Void Fighter began life as a Star Wars fan game, Garske has created a custom universe for it, the "Sagittarian frontier", a "densely populated but remote star cluster", which the Void Tiger rebels seek to defend from the authoritatian insectoid Centaurians. Other factions active in the setting are analogues for a variety of popular sci-fi species and tropes which players are likely to have models for, from relentless robots, to pirates, to organic ships.
While there's nothing in the Void Fighter rulebook to agitate the lawyers at Lucasfilm Limited, if you have a Star Wars X-Wing collection you should be able to readily identify which classes of ship your miniatures will work as from their rules alone. They're all illustrated by Dimitris Martinos, who Garske picked for his pulpy art style. "I said I wanted things to look like '70s and '80s fighter jets", Garske says – Martinos delivered.
The rulebook is being published by Osprey Games. It's currently on pre-order and is due out on August 28. At "60,000 to 80,000 words" it's a behemoth compared to the svelte pamphlets Garske published for the Weirdos games. Garske has used the extra word count for "dozens of ready made spaceships, 13 scenarios, and a campaign system".
Void Fighter will not offer the same gameplay experience as X-Wing. If you want to keep playing the old classic, you should investigate the X-Wing Alliance, a global fan community supporting the game even now that official support has ended. But if you're happy to play something different that is nevertheless inspired by a deep love for Star Wars, Void Fighter is one to watch
We'll also take a moment to shout out Squadron Strike, another Star Wars inspired wargame that has options for full 3D space combat. You'll often find its creator hanging out in the official Wargamer Discord server – come and join the conversation!