Leviathan-class steampunk miniatures will compete with Star Wars X-Wing, Armada

polygon.com:

Leviathans, the ambitious steampunk airship miniatures game, is being relaunched more than 11 years after its initial debut. With a crowdfunding campaign set to go live on Aug. 2, just ahead of the Gen Con tabletop gaming convention in Indianapolis, Indiana, publisher Catalyst Game Labs (the tabletop home to the BattleTechand Shadowrun franchises) has cleared the deck, as it were, overcoming a decade’s worth of impediments to bring the epic game to market in a proper fashion. Polygon spoke about the project with co-creator and company founder Randall Bills in late July.

Hobbyists likely know Catalyst for its 2019 BattleTech: Clan Invasion Kickstarter campaign, which raised more than $2.5 million to relaunch an all-plastic line of miniatures based on the shared library of legacy BattleTech units (also part of games by Harebrained Schemes and Piranha Games). With millions of mechs now in circulation, Randall says it’s time to expand the company just a little bit. His son, Bryn Bills, is the Leviathans line developer.

“Over COVID, to entertain ourselves, we probably played upwards of 70 different miniatures games to try to just get a better feel for the industry, and Leviathans is still one of my favorites, after going through all of that, after all this time,” Bryn Bills said. “I love this universe, I love the art style, the ships. There’s really nothing that I don’t enjoy top-to-bottom.”

The historical wargame’s point of departure comes in 1878 with the discovery of the lighter-than-air substance known as electroid. Seagoing warships rapidly become obsolete, with the colonial European powers now contending for the airspace itself. In this way, the franchise is reminiscent of the 1920+ universe, the basis for the hit