Wargame Design- Castles in the Sky

[Eric Farrington]

I am sure many of you have noticed that the Osprey Wargaming Series has another title coming out in June. This one is called, Castles in the Sky- A Game of Flying Battleships. This book was 5 or 6 years in the making, and has been one of my most difficult games to get "right". There are a couple of things you will need to know about it right away:



-This game is 80 pages long, longer than a typical Osprey Blue Book

-All the art in this book is new and unique, never before seen in any Osprey book

-All the model shots are new from Brigade Models taken just for this book

-This book is V5.2 of the rules, and took many people's help and assistance to get this far. This one was a community project just as much as something I wrote. Big thanks to all those who helped along the way, there are too many Usernames, names, and handles to document without getting into trouble for missing one, but you know who you are! Huge thanks.

As many of you know, the first game I made from scratch was a 40K wet-navy wargame, and I see my efforts here as a return to my "roots". This is a game that sprang from a few different sources of inspiration:

-Castles of Steel and Dreadnought by Massie. Two works about the naval arms race prior to World War I between Britain and Germany. They are the sources of the name for this book.

-My studies in college about naval warfare and work on pre-WWI diplomatic history

-The Aeronef genre of games such as Aeronef, Imperial Skies, Leviathans, Sky Galleons of Mars, Dystopian Wars, and many more
Musings on the Delta Vector blog

-A variety of wargames from oceans to space and beyond.



As I approached Castles in the Sky, I had a few key design elements that I wanted to be sure to capture in the rules. I will let you read them and decide if I was successful in my goals. My design notes did not make it to the final book for space reasons, so you will have to read them here instead. I hope you enjoy or gain some insights.

Castles in the Sky had the following design goals:

-Scale and Model agnostic

-3D battlespace

-Meaningful choices to be made

-Ships that can take a pounding, until they can't

-Battleship > Cruiser > Escort > Battleship

-Maneuver matters

-Some relationship to naval warfare of the period..... but flying

You can read more about the game and how I came to these design goals on my Blood and Spectacles blog post. That can be found here:
bloodandspectacles.blogspot.com/2022/04/wargame-design-castles-in-sky.html