Origins and Design Philosophy

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 simply kept finding new ones.

Over the next forty years, a design philosophy took hold: games where choosing and building your units could counter whatever strategy an opponent brought to the table, where play moved fast enough to wrap up in two or three hours, and where the outcome always carried a bit of unpredictability. Above all, players needed real agency, not just what to do, but when and how to do it. Along the way, a community grew from a handful of friends into thousands of players across the country.

Airships & Empires is where all of those experiences came together. Eleven years in the making, the game spent long stretches back on the shelf, set aside and returned to again and again, because the idea refused to let go. Its key mechanics hold true to that same agency and flexibility, without losing sight of the fun in blowing an opponent's airship out of the sky. Command Point allocation puts every critical function of a turn directly in the captain’s hands. Airship design lets players personalize their fleet and keep opponents guessing about its strengths and weaknesses. And Infernal Machines add just enough chaos to make even the best strategists gulp the moment they realize they miscalculated.

The mechanics are what make the game fun, but the best part of any game is still the friendships that form over hours of play, the laughs that come even when an airship goes down in spectacular fashion, and a night that's just as much fun lost as won. That is the standard Airships & Empires was built to meet: the culmination of a lifetime spent discovering what brings people together, keeps them engaged, creates a bunch of laughs, and leaves them with a story worth telling long after the dice have stopped rolling.

Want the whole story? The short version above is the polite one. If you want the full forty-year saga, pour yourself a drink and pull up a chair. You've been warned.