One Billion Suns: Printable Fleets and Tokens

Posted On April 1, 2024

NOT 3D PRINT FILES!

Sheesh.

A Billion Suns has been on my shelf for far too long.  That’s Mike Hutchinson’s space shoot-em-up wargame built from the bottom up with an objective system that gives it more of an economics and shoot-n-scoot flavor than a line-em-up one.  It’s been languishing unplayed in my collection because the buy-in is really steep.  I had thought to use Irregular Miniatures’s skyships with it, but the two full packs shown here aren’t enough.  Not hardly.

I used these for “Castles in the Sky”. Not a bad game, but the WWI dreadnought engine it is built on turned out not to be my cup of tea.

Which raises the question of “how much stuff DO you really need to get started?”. Clearly you need some ships and terrain, but this isn’t the sort of game where you build a single fleet, and you are ready to go.  Instead you assemble a shipyard full of ships that you might need at the day, purchase them on the fly as you play the game.

You’re definitely going to need utility ships, but how many fighters escorts you need depends entirely upon the table top situation now at hand.  It can change from turn to turn. Not only that, but you’ll want to have a decent collection of objective markers of varying types.  Which types get used depends on which objectives are randomly generated during the game.  You cannot count on playing “the scenario with the space station” or “the scenario with the asteroids”.  To do the game justice, you need to be ready for anything right out of the jumpgate.

Unfortunately, book doesn’t give you a dedicated shopping list.  That information, or a reasonable stab at it given the vagaries of play-style, is hidden on Mike’s Getting Started With A Billion Suns page.  Using that guide, I’ve made this handy little sheet of icons for the most used features.  The circle with the Planet Smasher logo is a planet marker.

[EDIT: This is the third damn time I’ve uploaded this image.  You’re going to want two different planets, one for diamonds and one for hearts.  They have different objectives associated with them.  Since I was updating that, I double the rest.  Now you’ll have enough for Size 10 games, which are going to be ludicrously busy with ships and counters.]

And here are the ships.  I’ve designed these so that the relative sizes are consistent.  The three numbers are the silhouette, thrust, and shields for each class of vessel.  The gear icons are jump points, and are included for the sake of completeness.

[Another edit: I’ve added suspicious ships, criminals, lifeboats, krakens and a funky psychedelic rhexis pearl marker to this sheet.  Ore, med-teams, hackers, and spies can be dealt with using beads or chips because I’m not doing this again.  You’ll only be able to play up through Size 6 games with this one sheet.  Print two for bigger games. ]

Scale to suit, print and mount, and have fun with these.