At any point in time, there are a number of games I’d like to design (or, at the very least, magically have exist). Here’s what’s on my mind at the moment:
Ace and Admiral – The Star Wars Miniatures Starship Battles game came with a lovely set of miniatures and a desperately poor rule set. Although the rules were derived from the popular Games Workshop game Battlefleet Gothic they were simplified far too much. The game is now sort of like chess without nearly as much tactical depth. Sadness. I currently have a draft going for a game that should, I hope, more directly model the feel of fleet combat in Star Wars, with lumbering battlecruisers and swarms of fighters desperately trying to take them down.

Star Wars minis – Unlike the Starship Battles game, Star Wars Miniatures is a good game. It is, however, focused on very small actions, with just a few people on each side. I’d like a version that plays quickly and has a little room for officers, squads, and other organizational bits. Basically, I want a fast, easy, and still Star-Wars-feeling game that lets me use my big squads of Stormtroopers, my AT-STs, and so forth.

Fleet Action – Every so often, I’ve thought about a Star Trek starship combat game. Many years ago, a friend and I made a super-super simplistic one that really replicated the original show (it had about two paragraphs of rules, and a critical hit table that had results like “Ship spins wildly”). These days, I think that trying to model ship-to-ship combat on a tactical scale is kind of unfun in the Star Trek universe, but I’d love to have a larger-scale game that tracks movement of ships, with larger-scale objectives and so forth, so you could play out a Federation-Romulan war, or run an Ogre-like scenario with a Borg cube. To really catch the flavor, I’d go for a Card-Driven Game, or CDG. FYI, the picture I’m using is from the Battle of the Omarion Nebula, which looked like it was going to be a totally cool episode of DS9, and turned out to be an okay episode of DS9.

Salient – A revised set of rules to go with the mountain of 6mm miniatures I have. I’ve always enjoyed the epic scope of battles allowed by this miniature scale, and as a consequence I over time accrued a ton of 6mm minis to play with various editions of Games Workshops’ Epic line. These days, I’d like a system that taps into ideas of morale a little bit more, especially as I’m enamored of the idea of Tyranids being without morale — it makes for really interesting “people versus the bugs” battles. Cool beans. I have some drafts of this, but I want to simplify dramatically more from what I currently have.