Macrocosm has a new line of science fiction miniatures — and a free rules set. From their website:
Macrocosm is a 28mm Sci-Fi Skirmish game set in a future galaxy of excitement, rayguns, weird aliens and wonder.
Players take on the role of a group of adventurers and explorers, represented by a group of miniatures, where they play out scenarios and campaigns to determine the fate of the colonies and to further the glory of their chosen faction… and of course… to have fun!
Point of No Return is a set of free wargames rules for starship combat with simple vector movement and inertia.
Task Force Zeta is a set of free wargames rules for starship combat.
Pundits will tell you that representing space combat in 3 dimensions is a wasted exercise in mathematics, and that two ships fighting can be equally well represented on a 2-dimensional plane. What happens when you have three ships? ten? Did their captains all just conveniently forget about attacking/defending from the z axis?
Task Force Zeta allows you to fight battles against opponents in a representation of real (3-D) space using vector movement – without doing complex math every time you move or fire. Fourteen different ship classes are provided, along with fighters and bases, as well as basic rules for ship construction – design your own factions or convert ships from your favorite movies/TV shows!
One of the joys of Heroscape is that you can use literally any 25mm / 28mm figures. You just have to make up cards for them. This has led to efforts by a large number of people to duplicate the look of Milton Bradley’s double hex unit cards. Here’s one such effort. Its a .tif file in layers that you import into your favorite graphics editor. Be warned, though. It’s a big file at 13.4 megs.
Prehistoric Pocket is a set of rules fr dinosaur hunting.