In December ’23, my good friend Evie Moriarty asked me if I wanted to resurrect the World War II tank combat game we’d worked on about a year prior and turn it into a scifi tank skirmish wargame instead. We had put Hull Down, the WWII game, to bed as we had reached a point where we needed to consider either productionising the game or shopping it to a publisher, and at that point we had neither the energy to self publish nor could we find anyone willing to take it on. This time though, we had a plan and we were willing to put some start up capital behind it.
We founded Epigram Games to write Hypersteel Nightmare, and on the 17th of May 2024 we released the game to the public. That was two years ago, and we’re approaching 250 copies sold. For a first published game, that’s not nothing, but it’s not changing the face of wargaming as we know it either. So here on the second anniversary of the game, I thought it would be fun to do some reflection with a retrospective of what went well and what we could have done better.
What is a Hypersteel
Hypersteel Nightmare is a small scale miniatures agnostic science ficition armoured combat vehicle skirmish game. Breaking that down, that means it’s a game that lets you use any models you want, as long as they’re in a scale between 6 and 15mm1; to play skirmishes (battles between small numbers of combatants) with scifi tanks, mechs and aircraft.
2023 was when Games Workshop released Legions Imperialis, the successor to Adeptus Titanicus adding tanks and infantry to the miniatures range and folding in aircraft from Aeronautica Imperialis. It is possibly the fiddliest game Games Workshop have published in the modern era, and runs so counter to modern design philosophy that only the Specialist Design Studio could have published it. Evie and I looked at it and went “what if you had a good game you could play with those lovingly sculpted quarter-scale renditions of Horus Heresy tanks and mechs?”.
Being miniatures agnostic, the core of the game is the rules to build your own units. It is a very flexible system which can support everything from real world tanks to gundams, from battlemechs to kaiju, from battle zepplins to mad max. The game was designed to be quick: we aimed for a playtime for experienced players of about an hour, and in reality a full size game takes about 90 minutes. This is still miles better than the average Horus Heresy game, which routinely takes in excess of three hours.
The actual game mechanics were designed to be fair but decisive. The alternate activation system gave players signficant tactical flexibility, and minimised downtime; whilst the damage system was designed to make sure that as many shots resulted in something happening as possible.
I still stand by the game as being an incredible achievement. The critical reception has been good, people have approached me at conventions unbidden to say how much they enjoyed the game and the quick ten minute demo I do at conventions has a pretty amazing success rate in converting to sales.
The Bad Bets
Herein lie the two fundamental mistakes that underpin Hypersteel Nightmare.
The first is that we mistakenly assumed that once the lustre came off the Legions Imperialis ruleset that there would be legions of players seeking out a new and better way to play with their tiny tanks and planes. We assumed that the long standing legacy of the old Epic community and their infinite fracturing based on which era of the game you preferred might help push those who purchased LI to be willing to try newer rulesets.
This was wrong, and given that both Evie and I have criticised One Page Rules evangalists for making basically the same mistake, this is the error I find most confounding. Your average LI purchaser does not care that LI is a bad game. They don’t want a good game2. They want a Games Workshop game. We were never going to be a Games Workshop game. And all those epic players? Those people wanted the specific experience epic gave them, and Hypersteel Nightmare was never going to be that experience.
Now this isn’t to say that there wasn’t an audience. In fact, my experience selling the game at conventions was that there were three distinct audiences:
- The first was the veteran wargamer. They already play battletech and dropzone and epic and loves them, but they see the virtue in a game they can play without monopolising their evening.
- The second is the invenerate collector. Maybe they have a 3D printer habit, maybe they’ve just got 200 unopened urbanmech blind boxes. Hypersteel’s flexibility means they can tell themselves that they will get their collection to the table.
- The third is the scale-curious. They don’t currently play any games in small scales, and likely don’t own any miniatures in this scale either, but the idea of a skirmish game that fits on a 2ft square means they can get started for very little money indeed.
The astute amongst you may have noticed the through-line for these three audiences: each has a solid idea of what Hypersteel Nightmare lets them imagine about themselves. The game allows each group to imagine themselves aspirationally playing the game. The original audience concept lacked any meaningful version of that3.
The second problem is that we scoped the game wrong. We joked during the development, and occasionally at conventions, that the proper role of infantry in Hypersteel Nightmare is as scouts or as terrain (to form a roadbump for your tanks). This was in part down to the game’s lineage as the successor to Hull Down, but also a desire to keep the game streamlined.
The problem with that approach, when compounded with our primary misunderstanding about our target audience, was that two of our three actual audiences are playing with existing collections and those collections often include infantry. People love combined arms games. People also love tanks. People want a tank focused combined arms game. It isn’t as big of a problem as the first, but it certainly lost us sales and now, in 2026, I have an expansion to sell but now I have to sell two books rather than one.
The Missing Miniatures
Miniatures agnostic is great if you already own miniatures, but at least a third of our audience don’t. And a further third want more miniatures anyway and the game gives them licence to buy them (especially if they can tell themselves they’re specifically compatible, and therefore more likely to see play). And even the last third is probably curious.
We launched the game sans miniatures. Friend of Epigram Tim Poplier, now significantly more notable as the writer for the Tankhead Encyclopedia, started work on an independent set of 3D printable minaitures deisgned for Hypersteel Nightmare but somewhere between other commitments only the first tranche were ever completed. And as much as I loved the designs he was working on, it was in essence a single aesthetic style, a single faction, and also more of a toolkit for building units than it was a pick up and go minaitures line.
Releasing it as just the book (plus play aids and stickers) at the start was an explicit choice, and unlike the two primary misunderstanding above, we walked into this choice with open eyes, and I am unsure how we could have done any different with the resources we had at the time. But, if we were going to do it again, I’d have wanted to start the process with at least two, if not three, factions worth of miniatures enough to have both a 50pt skirmish list and extras to expand for the release of the book.
That is however a massive investment in both sculpting and production. Now, I had started sculpting tanks and mechs almost as soon as we’d finished the first proper draft of the game. Some were my own design, some were based on the artwork in the book by our artist Juan Ochoa. But getting them to production was difficult and basically involved me bootstrapping a resin miniatures production line in my workshop. I rushed to get two starter armies based on the example forces in the book ready for UKGE 2025, and in the end only managed to get one of them produced in time, and they sold reasonably well. But this was a monumental effort and helps segue into the third fundamental issue: time and the division of labour.
Epigram was founded in 2024, when both me and Evie were in significantly different situations to what we find ourselves now. But also, the work of writing Hypersteel Nightmare was one in which we could share the work reasonably evenly. We shared design and writing duties, as well as layout. Miniatures though, Evie was not a sculptor and had no interest in casting or production. It was not a duty we could share and that limited how we could scale it without investing in external production4.
If an Indie Wargame is published and no-one sees it…
So we wrote Hypersteel Nightmare, and we got the books printed, and we started attending wargaming conventions, and we tried to use our own networks to push the game, but statistically we still only sold a copy every three days. What gives. I mean aside from having the wrong idea about our target market, we didn’t do enough marketing.
Part of that was down to working capital. We spent our money on artwork and up front production costs, and worked in the hope that taking the game to wargaming shows would be enough. Dear reader, it isn’t. Now it doesn’t help that by this point, twitter was dead. Bluesky doesn’t have adverts (yet). Facebook adverts had been a known scam for years. I don’t understand Reddit any more (and all the major subreddits are so anti-promotion I don’t know where you’d even begin).
Instagram is probably the last bastion of a single centralised wargaming community and its algorithm makes content discovery a breeze, but there’s a problem. We had written one (1) book. I had sculpted maybe five miniatures. There were maybe two dozen illustrations total. We did not have an easy firehose of content to share to attempt to produce an audience. Youtube too understands that content discovery is its lifeblood, but video production is hard and expensive and neither of us had the time nor resources to really produce the kind and volume of content that would make either longform youtube or youtube shorts/tiktok work.
If this sounds like post-hoc rationalisation? It absolutely is. We could and should have found ways around this. Either spending money and seeing where the advertising worked, or spending time (and money) producing content we could share in the places where that content would be shared.
But this seques onto a second, related problem. We had written one (1) book. We dutifully created a discord server, which has more than zero interaction in it, which is frankly a small miracle. But as we had only one meaningful product, and no new whole audience products on the horizon5, even if we could have got more people talking in the discord we had nothing to try and sell to them.
Time is a river, and oh look, rapids
I returned from UKGE 2025 full of pep and vigour. The game was received really well and I had three days of very good (for us) trading. There was just one problem. I, to this point, haven’t really talked about the situation that Evie and I were in. Probably obviously, Epigram was not our livelyhoods. I was, and still am, a senior software developer. I have a fancy job title at a company that makes retail space planning software (so when they move stuff in a supermarket, there’s a chance I run the infrastructure that makes the software that makes that possible) and as much as I love my job, Epigram gives me a significant creative outlet and also, the company I work for is very good on work-life balance and so I (usually) have time enough to do Epigram things on the side.
Some time after we published Hypersteel Nightmare, Evie got a job at Modiphus, and then some time after that she got a promotion to studio lead, because she is an incredibly talented designer. And Modiphus is a lot, and none of it is my story to tell here, but shortly after UKGE was done Evie asked to leave the business as when choosing two of personal life, Modiphus, and Epgriam, it’s not even a choice. I was sad to lose her expertise, but equally we founded Epigram during a period where neither of us had an outlet and now she was working on the Fallout licence.
And then my dayjob exploded. I can talk about even less of why that happened6, but for several months I had no time nor energy for anything beyond keeping my head above water, which is why I kept promising that Hypersteel Meatgrinder was just around the corner and it didn’t happen for the rest of 2025 despite having had an almost complete draft in August.
This is the point in the retrospective where I change gears. Because whilst yes, the time limitations put a dampener on what we could do, the thing we still did was produce an entire wargame and take it to conventions and all the other things. We did it, and we did it with style. We could have done elements better, we could have done more, but what we did was significant and I am so incredibly proud of it.
What we did right
I will stand by Hypersteel Nightmare as a good game and shout about it until my voice is gone. We made an exceptional mechanical engine, and we turned it into a beautiful book. The cover art and internal spot illustrations by Juan Ochoa have been almost universally praised and the experience of working with Juan was great.
Working with Evie was also great. I’d like to think that we complemented each other quite well. Evie is an exceptional designer and I learned a huge amount working with her.
It was also an excellent opportunity to put some of my theories regarding game design into practice. Most notably, I built a numerical simulation of parts of the game to help identify good bounds for probable statistics for various weapons, building on top of similar design I’d done a year prior for Hull Down. Personally, I feel like having an (at least somewhat) mathematically grounded base to build off of helped speed development significantly.
What’s next?
I came back from UKGE 2025 with a few things on my mind. The big one was Hypersteel Meatgrinder, the long requested infantry expansion. I finished Meatgrinder earlier this year and I am proud of what I’ve achieved. It’s a difficult line to draw between wanting to keep the game armour-focused whilst still giving infantry a meaningful role to play. It’s also, I think, a beautiful thing: it’s a hardback expansion with another wonderful Juan Ochoa piece on the front cover and it physically complements the core rulebook exceptionally well.
With that out of the way, it does kind of feel like Hypersteel is finished. There are a few places the game could still go:
- Hypersteel Bathyscape: additional rules for open water combat. New rules for boat/ship movement, new chassis for battleships, new improved carrier rules, an extended damage model, and extended rules for littoral combat.
- Hypersteel Deathspiral: extended rules for aerial combat, both as a standalone game and a side game to play with in-reserve aircraft.
- Hypersteel Night-terror: a more comprehensive overhaul of Hypersteel28 as presented in the core rulebook.
- Voidsteel Oblivion: to Battlefleet Gothic as Hypersteel Nightmare is to Epic/Legions Imperialis.
- Hull Down/Rolled Steel: merge Hypersteel Nightmare and Meatgrinder and take it back to it’s WWII roots.
But each one has its own issues as a new project.
Bathyscape and Deathspiral are probably just too small7 to have meaningful audiences. Both could be retooled to be independent games, but now they become much larger projects, and I’m not sure there’s enough in there to justify that. Part of me wants to make them both as a tête-bêche (where both books are bound back to back) but again, that’s a lot of work.
Night-terror (aside from needing a new name) is the simplest option on the list, but would it be much more than some reprinted tables? Would it even be enough to fill a zine?
Voidsteel Oblivion is the one on this list my heart sings to the most, and it is the one that is the most dangerous. The very same argument that I have spent over two thousand words going over here applies all the more to Voidsteel Oblivion. Anyone who wants to play Battlefleet Gothic can, and nothing I write can be Battlefleet Gothic. But even more than that, there’s no major supply of third party BFG-like spaceships and there’s no single concept that could handle the same breadth of cross-media integration that Hypersteel Nightmare supports, because different media treats the base physics of space combat differently whereas a tank is a tank is a tank.
Finally, Hull Down/Rolled Steel on the one hand has no real negatives to it. There’s always room in the market for new WWII rules. And especially if you were somewhat tricksy with ranges you could make the same game work at 10mm and 28mm with different conversiont tables. A large portion of the development work is done, and a large portion of the work still to do could be adapted back for a hypothetical Hypersteel Nightmare 2E. But ultimately there is a bigger issue, which also underpins all the other options:
Hypersteel Nightmare was a collaboration between myself and Evie. It’s not that I don’t think I could pull any of these off, but that it would in my mind be a compromise position from what it could have been with Evie on board. The other reason that Meatgrinder was delayed was that it was weird working on it solo. And even then, we’d discussed enough of it during the time we were working together that I feel it keeps the same DNA.
So what’s actually next
Because development is done, doesn’t mean the game disappears. And the fact that I believe in the game means I still really want to see it succeed. You’ll still see me at wargaming shows, asking passers by if they’re interested in tiny scifi skirmish.
But I’ve made no secret that my next project is taking Able Artemis to market. There will be a future post talking about why, but the short of it is that even without the issue of not wanting to continue to work on Hypersteel Nightmare without Evie, Able Artemis has a much better pitch than basically any of the successor projects except for maybe Hull Down.
Cold War Gone Hot On The Moon is an experience you can’t get anywhere else.
- Or between 1:300 and 1:100, roughly speaking. ↩︎
- This is maybe unfair. They want an enjoyable game, but honestly, they want a game that has accessible miniatures support, that they can purchase from a known entity, that they know there will be a meaningful community for. ↩︎
- More accurately, the aspiration wasn’t aspirational. It’s a very similar problem to the one faced by non-D&D indie RPGs, in that people playing D&D aren’t thinking “I would like a better experince, I will seek out a different game”, they seek out new D&D content. Unless a player had already internalised the idea that you can play games other than those published by Games Workshop, “play Hypersteel Nightmare” is a non-sequitur rather than an aspiration. ↩︎
- Even if we could have just thrown money at the problem, finding reliable options for third party production is hard. It’s one of my main challenges today. I don’t do everything myself purely because I can’t afford to pay other people to do it, I also have unreasonably high standards. ↩︎
- In theory, I could have reoriented the company to the production of miniatures (or even STLs for 3D printing) but to me the sculpting of miniatures is mostly a thing I do either for my own enjoyment or to explicitly support another project. ↩︎
- At some point shortly after UKGE but before the period of significant stress, my boss asked me if there was a risk that I might leave my job to run Epigram full time. When I stopped laughing, I pulled up the company bank account and showed him, and we both agreed there was no risk. The dayjob pays the bills and makes working on Epigram things possible. It has to come first every day of the week and twice on Thursdays. Yes I know the saying is twice on Sundays, but again, my employer generally has a good work-life balance and I can’t tell you the last time we had to work weekends, and frankly who has the energy to do anything twice on a Friday? ↩︎
- It is weird that scifi si rarely has seagoing vessels in it. You’d think that given the Earth is 70% water, and most habitable planets will be similar to preserve a meaningful water cycle for life, you’d have a lot of navies. The only one I can really think of in the wargaming space is the Spartan Games one. ↩︎