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Has anyone ever tried out Full Thrust? It's a free space battleship wargame. Lately my wife and I have been watching lots of Gundam (we had a Char's Counterattack party last weekend) and I might be able to get her to play with me...

I don't have much hope of finding figures of gundam battleships, I was figuring I'd just find silhouettes online or something and have sheets of paper to push around and make really cool sound effects when mega beam launchers take out a ship or something. You know.

Anyway, the free rules for Full Thrust can be found here: http://www.groundzerogames.net/mambo/

I've not played it in a while, but I really like it.

Looking at the GZG downloads page, there are several Full Thrust documents. "Full Thrust" is the original core rulebook, while Fleet Books 1 and 2 are supplements giving the "official" stats for several of the fleets in the miniatures range* - and also rewrite almost the entire core rulebook with the exception of the basic concepts.

The best place to start is probably the FT Light English Version - it's a fan-made document which takes the basic rules as amended by the fleet books and reproduces those in a very shiny PDF document.

My preference is to play the Fleet Book rules using the "vector movement system". It's not really any more complicated to play than the normal "cinematic" movement, and I think it adds another layer of tactical thinking. It's perhaps not always the best representation of some settings. I've not watched enough Gundam (except for Gundam Wing, years ago) to know.

Be careful with fighters - they're a known problem in the game. At relatively low levels - the sort of levels in the official fleet lists - they're OK, but it's quite easy to unbalance the game. Take enough fighters and you'll win very easily - unless your opponent brings enough point defence, in which case you'll lose. Conversely, bring too few fighters and you'll get swamped - unless your opponent has taken a load of point defence in which case you'll outgun him. Fleet design is probably best approached in a cooperative way, rather than "how can I break the design rules this week".

*Fleet Book 1 gives the stats for the first four human fleets - NAC, FSE, ESU and NSL - although the miniatures ranges have since been mostly replaced, and the current miniatures don't have official stats, nor do the UNSC, Japanese, Israeli, OUDF or more recent fleets. FB2 is the aliens - the Kra'Vak. Phalon and Savasku fleets