Precis Intermedia and Brett M. Bernstein bring us, Warcosm is a tactical spacefleet combat game in a 21+ page PDF. The product is bundled with a 21 page rulebook/scenarios, letter-sized hex map (print many of these), a sheet of ship counters (generic), scenario combat tracking sheet, and a font for weapon attack arcs. I think this is the first product I have ever download that included a font.
Warcosm: Victory in the Stars presents a future with three competing races the Terran Commonwealth (humans), Venthi Imperium (avians) and Drogaar Federation (other). These three races are used to frame warcosm scenarios included at the back of the book. The book is broken up seven sections, with each section taking up no more space then absolutely necessary. The first four sections of the book are focused on the rules of Warcosm from basic terminology (facing, firing arcs and so on) through fighter squadrons. The statblock of a ship in Warcosm can be written on five lines (name, hull, drives, subsystems, and weapons) with boxes [] being used to represent the amount of hits a location can take before being rendered useless. The rules are very good at both telling and showing you what to do, as illustrative examples of the rules are provided in each and every section. Initially, the combat seemed a little too complex for quick start but I found when Kurt and I sat down to run through one of the provided scenarios (Omega Contact) with reference sheet in hand things ran pretty smoothly. After the defeat of the Terrans in this scenario, we reviewed the rules to see what we screwed-up on but by the time we reached (The Enemy of my Enemy) with Tammy joining us for this last scenario we had a good grip of rules. It will be probably a while before we’ve mastered the rules, but we are very comfortable with them after just a few games.
In addition to the rules and scenarios there are also rules for creating your own ships and randomly generating scenarios. I think Warcosm stands well on its own as a tactical space combat game with a good amount of strategic depth, I think this system could be ported over to sci-fi based rpgs with space combat that is lacking.
