Big news from Planet Smasher HQ: Osprey have agreed to publish a second edition of my spaceship battle game, A Billion Suns, coming 2026!
The Difficult Second Album
A Billion Suns was my second published miniatures game, and at the time I honestly felt like I had something to prove with it. After the success of Gaslands, an immediate and visceral game, I wanted to show “range” as a designer, and make a fresh and innovative game, not just “Gaslands in space”. I’m really proud of A Billion Suns, but it wasn’t an easy game to design, and definitely felt like my difficult second album.
With time and distance from the original design process, and more confidence in myself as a designer and as “a brand”, I can see both flaws and unrealised opportunities in the game that I’m really excited to tackle with a new edition.
In addition, we find ourselves in a somewhat different market to that of 2018. When I first wrote ABS, Star Wars: Armada was riding high and it seemed obvious that a re-release of Battlefleet Gothic was imminent (what with the 2018 re-release of Adeptus Titanicus, and the popular Battlefleet Gothic video game). A Billion Suns was designed to create its own distinctive (if somewhat idiosyncratic) space in the market. It was unlike anything else, because then it wouldn’t compete with the incumbent juggernauts. However, for whatever reasons, we find ourselves now in 2024 without a single obvious ‘best’ capital-ship level spaceship game. Star Wars Armada is gone. Firestorm Armada is gone. Battlefleet Gothic still slumbers. Dropfleet Commander is still active (and cool, check out their newly announced second edition boxset), but has forged its own distinctive (if somewhat idiosyncratic) space in the market.
Why a second edition?
The first edition of A Billion Suns has a really neat combat system and a really novel and bizarre interlocking army-list/deployment/objective system that I’m really proud of. However, the game can appear quite intimidating to a new player. Even though the core of the game system is quite simple, four things provide barriers to the fun: the lack of list building, the dense “core systems” game mode (with its triple objectives), the on-the-fly buy-what-you-want gameplay, and the ugly layout of the book.
Lots of people come to the game expecting to find a spaceship battle game, so they can smash fleets of battleships together and watch them boil into the vacuum of space. There is plenty of combat in A Billion Suns, but it is very deliberately in service of the real core objective of the game which is the economy. If you want to smash spaceships together, the first edition of A Billion Suns doesn’t provide a direct way of achieving that.
With ABS2, I want to make the game more approachable for new players, while also offering more and deeper gameplay to existing players.
I want new players to find a simple and intuitive spaceship battle game, with generic unit types, cool combat and command systems, simple objectives and scenarios, and enough faction asymmetry to provide replayability. I want them to be able to paint some spaceships and light each other up, without an economics degree. However, I also want to cherish the bizarre and twisted heart of the game, and show respect to those players that have achieved ABS enlightenment by maintaining the economic game as an ‘expert’ way to play the game.
More broadly, I want to turn A Billion Suns into the best spaceship miniatures game toolkit available: featuring an awesome, simple and fun core game system, plus a host of different game modes, list-building modes and campaign options to let you play whatever sort of spaceship game you want.
The new edition will be a stand-alone hardback, and that means it gets its own bespoke layout and graphic design. I’m particularly excited to see this game get laid out again, with a less limited page count and more space to breathe. The layout of the blue book version of A Billion Suns is definitely somewhat responsible for the difficulty for new players to grok the game on first reading. Some of the spreads in the book (like pages 24-25 for example) make the game seem more dense and confusing, where a more spacious layout would have made it seem methodical and logical.
What is changing? What is staying the same?
Here’s the good news: I am not planning on making sweeping changes to the ABS game system. I really love the core systems, and so movement, combat, jump point deployment, commands and CMD tokens will see the least change. If you know how to play ABS now, you are going to know how to play ABS2. The scenarios, game modes, list-building, and objectives (basically the ways in which you USE the core game system) are the things I want to focus most of my energy on.
Having said that, there are a few small areas in the core game system I plan on simplifying or tidying, (and I’d love to hear your wishlist of these too). Top of my list are:
- Simplify/removing battlegroups
- Allow ships to pivot once at any point during movement, instead at just the start
- Bump most ranges up by an inch to give everything more breathing space
- Remove destruction of jump points and jump shock
- Folding orders and commands into the same system
- Decouple the Jump Step and CMD tokens
I’ve learnt a lot from designing Hobgoblin and Pacific Command (as well as my Rotvarlden and Rad Pirates prototypes), and will be importing many lessons and ideas from those games as I develop ABS2.
In particular, I’m thinking about making more distinct and defined Games Modes, which you can mix and match with the Contract Sets to create all sorts of different feeling spaceship games.
- Game Modes
- Quick Start Mode: The super-simple version of the game, designed to fit on a single sheet of paper and teach the very basics of the game, as the Quick Start Rules do today.
- Limited Mode: You pre-build your lists, but deploy them dynamically. I explored this in Rotvarlden and it’s pretty awesome. I expect this to be the default entry point to the game.
- Unlimited Mode: This is the classic ABS1 mode. You have infinite money and requisition ships on the fly.
- Campaign Mode: I have a lot of ideas to make the campaign system deeper and more fun. I had a whole map-based campaign system that I had to cut out of the first edition. It will build onto the ship-class-unlock system of the ABS1 campaigns.
- Solo Mode: As many people have enjoyed this, I’d like to take the time to improve the solo mode tooling and put it in the book.
- Contract Sets
- Warzone: Straight-forward battle mode with the sort of objectives you’d expect from a wargame. This won’t be the existing Warzone contracts, I’m going to rebuild this mode from the ground up.
- Core Systems: The much more narratively varied procedural scenario system from ABS1.
- The Fringe: The much-touted contact set for pirates, smugglers and prospectors.
I also have an idea for an orbital / ground attack system, but I’m not commiting to including that!
What is the timeline?
I’m planning to work on the second edition between October and December this year, with the aim of getting a playtest version out in January 2025. I’m due to turn in the manuscript in Summer 2025, and I’d like at least 6months of playtesting if I can manage it.
Once the manuscript is in, it will be about a year until the book is released by Osprey. We are targeting a launch in Summer 2026.
However, as anyone who was around for the launch of the first edition of this game knows, timelines can shift for all sorts of reasons, so consider this a best guess rather than a commitment.
What can you do to help?
I’m going to be running a survey soon, to gather input from you and the rest of the community on what you’d like to see in a new edition of the game. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the game and what I should and shouldn’t change.
You can come and hang out in the Planet Smasher Games Discord server, which will be the primary hub for the public beta of the second edition, once I open it.
You can follow along with my design work on my Planet Smasher Games YouTube channel, where I post regular behind-the-scenes videos, like this one:
Thanks so much for your interest in my games. It’s a total privilege to get to make miniatures games for you, and I can’t wait to make this new one for you!
Cheers,
Mike