Anyone familiar with our modern skirmish rules, At Close Quarters, will recognize the similarities with Future Wars. This is intentional, as the mechanisms of “At Close Quarters” are tried and tested, and we believe that they work pretty well. The game is intended to be fast and fun, and so we have kept paperwork and table consulting to a minimum. Mechanisms like the randomized movement distances and the alternate unit movement system have been introduced, to avoid the need for the contentious and boring business of order writing. The courage and skill of your fighters, supported by your own tactical ability, will often count for more than the hardware they are carrying.

The world of Future Wars is one which will be familiar to most people, in broad outline at least, from science fiction films. It is not a pleasant one to live in. In the post-apocalyptic near future, the cities of earth have become battlegrounds for a variety of factions – including organized crime, local citizen militias, and well armed troopers employed by successful gangsters or powerful business interests (if there is in fact any difference between these last two). The wealthiest and most ruthless of these factions deploy some hideous hi-tech weaponry in pursuit of their goals, releasing killing machines like Terminator robots and Zombies (the latter perhaps the products of some mad scientific experiment) onto the streets. At the other end of the social scale, desperate outlaws hold out in the crumbling sewers. There are even rumors of things far worse than any of these. With the planet’s defenses down, alien raiding parties of species previously only imagined in humanity’s worst nightmares – Hunters and Bugs – are being reported by those few who have survived their onslaughts. What happens next is limited only by your imagination….