In 1977, a ten year old kid wandered into a friend's house and stopped cold at the sight of a hex map covered in cardboard counters. He never really left that table. He just kept finding new ones. What followed was forty years of garage games, photocopied rulesets slipped into hobby shop bags, a community that grew from a handful of friends into thousands of players across the country, and a game design philosophy forged from equal parts passion and hard lessons.

Airships and Empires is where all of it landed. The energy allocation system that came out of a failed geometry class in 1983. The damage sequence borrowed from a starship crew on television. The conviction, learned the hard way, that simplicity serves players better than complexity ever will. This is not a game that appeared overnight. It is the result of a lifetime at the table, built by someone who has never stopped loving what happens when people sit down together over a good game.