Maelstrom's Edge: Battle For Zycanthus arrives!

It's finally here! Approximately four years and four months since I was first approached to work on the project, the launch box set of Maelstrom's Edge is in the wild and has arrived in the hands of our Kickstarter backers. It's also the first time I've had a look at the whole thing myself.

The Maelstrom's Edge: Battle For Zycanthus box set, together with my two co-written tie-in novels.

It's a satisfyingly heavy box, packed full of sprues - exactly how you want a new game to arrive! The box art is beautiful, too, and I've not noticed any typos in the back cover text I wrote, which is good!

A very full interior...

Inside the box is a veritable horde of plastics, tokens and cards. I've seen some of the infantry models before during our tests, but this was the first time I have had the opportunity to build the robots and Angels, and the first time I've ever seen the Handler, Kaddar Nova and Shadow Walker models in the flesh. The plastic is so crisp and the details are great, and the multipart models are great fun for converting - I've started building my Epirians and will post some pictures in a few weeks time. 

There's also the cards - unit cards for points costs and army building (that let us tweak the stats if we need to without reprinting the rulebook), mission cards for easy selection of which game to play, and an entire extra game using cards to represent fleets of ships battling for resources on worlds threatened by the Maelstrom. I'm looking forward to playing that in particular. 

The Maelstrom's Edge A5 rulebook details all the game rules, the army building for the first two factions, as well as lots of rich background to the Maelstrom's Edge universe

The biggest thrill for me, aside from the models themselves, is the 144 page full colour A5 Rulebook. Jon 'yakface' Regul has created an amazing ruleset full of dynamic action and careful battlefield tactics, and the diagrams and pictures in the book really do justice to it. There's also details on how to build armies for the first two factions - the corporate robots of the Epirian Foundation and the religious fanatics of the Karist Enclave.

I'm really proud of the fluff section, which I wrote a large part of. As well as delving further into the background of the Epirian and Karist factions, we also talk a lot more about the broader Maelstrom's Edge universe, including further details on future factions, which I'm very excited to start working on, like the exosuited House Champions of the Remnant Fleet, the ragtag rebels and revolutionaries of the Broken and the bizarre posthumans of the Kaigus Pact, changed after thousands of years living in the microgravity of space. These are the three factions we want to expand into next, and each should porvide a very different experience on the tabletop and in the fiction. There's also teasers for where we might go even further into the future, with hints at factions further from the Edge like the aquatic Tragunite Host and the the AI hunters of the Comm Guild. 

We've put so much effort into designing a universe and game to match the dreams we always had for a tabletop wargame. It's so amazing to finally see it in the flesh, and to start getting positiv feedback from our backers. I look forward to exploring more of the universe and creating more great content in the future!