Getting Started with Hypersteel Nightmare

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by

CJ Shearwood
in

Hypersteel Nightmare is a miniatures agnostic armoured combat vehicle skirmish game, which is a long winded way of saying that it gives you all the rules you need to play two player skirmishes between any two sets of tanks, planes, mechs, or any other fighting machines.

This guide exists to give you a quick introduction to the game, and to get you playing as quickly as possible.

Why Play Hypersteel Nightmare

  1. A full game of Hypersteel Nightmare plays on a 3ft x 3ft table in under ninety minutes, meaning you can easily play a game on the kitchen table in an evening in less time than the average hollywood blockbuster, including setup and teardown town.
  2. Alternate activations and the order token system mean there is almost no downtime in Hypersteel Nightmare. You are very rarely more than a few minutes away from being able to issue your own orders.
  3. Highly modular rules mean you can play a very simple games with a minimum of setup or go whole hog and write your own scenarios about attempting to board and capture flying aircraft carriers or navigating the innards of some giant monster.
  4. The book contains all the rules you need to write stats for almost any miniature ever made, whilst platoon building is so simple we have had players start writing their own lists on our convention stand without assistance.
  5. And if you want a feel for how the game works or how platoons are put together, we even have a free quickstart guide available for download today.

Buying the Rulebook

Hypersteel Nightmare is available in either physical or digital formats.

The physical book is a beautiful A5 hardback, printed in the UK on FSC paper1, with a subtle spot UV cover. It also comes with a complementary PDF, and contains everything you need to play the game (although you may wish to visit the Downloads page for printable versions of the unit and platoon rosters, and all the tokens you need to play the game).

The PDF is also available separately, a great option to dip your toes in or if you live in a country where we can’t currently ship to. It is fully accessible and printable, meaning you are free to print out relevant sections for reference.

Getting Started with Small Scale Miniatures

A group shot of the 50pt starter set, showing the murderbus, pulverizer, killcar and two sets of bikers

Hypersteel Nightmare is designed to work with 6-15mm scale miniatures, or roughly 1:350-1:100, although the book does include guidelines to play with 28/32mm miniatures. You might already own some of these games:

  • Legions Imperialis/Adeptus Titanicus2 from Games Workshop
  • Battletech from Catalyst Games
  • Dropzone Commander from TTCombat
  • Epic Warpath from Mantic
  • Armoured Clash from Warcradle

Or you might already own miniatures from other companies like:

  • Defeat in Detail from Vanguard Miniatures
  • Future War Commander from Pendraken Miniatures
  • Full Spectrum Dominance from The Lazy Forger
  • Gundam Assemble and RG/1:144 Gunpla from Bandai

Or you might have purchased some of our own miniatures, or have a 3D printer and have printed some of the many 6-10mm miniatures being released online every day. The point is that the options for purchasing miniatures at this scale are endless.

Creating Units in Hypersteel Nightmare

The core of Hypersteel Nightmare is the unit, and despite how daunting the roster might look at first, once you know the process you’ll be building your own units in no time (and if you’re anything like us, mentally looking at every new tiny miniature you see to figure out how it might fit).

Your first step is to choose a class (page 953): this determines the size (light, heavy, superheavy4) as well as your weapon mounts and some initial special rules. For your first unit, you probably want to pick a Heavy Battle Vehicle or a Heavy Mech.

Heavy Battle Vehicles cover turreted vehicles like tanks and gain the Relentless special rule, which allows them to drive straight through barricades and other similar terrain features and destroy them.

Heavy Mechs are walkers, and have two arm mounts. You can give them different weapons, but Heavy Mechs gain the Dual Mount special rule which gives you a discount for equipping both arms with the same weapon.

For this exercise we will be working through the rules for the Pulverzier, one of the Reave vehicles available for sale right now:

So we start with a Heavy Battle Vehicle which has an initial cost of 10 points and we can now give it weapons. Because it is a Heavy vehicle, it can take Heavy weapons in its turret, and Light or Versatile weapons in its hull and sponson mounts. This is however intended as a cheap unit to throw at the enemy and so we give it a Light Cannon in the turret for 3 points and Autoguns in the sponons and hull for 1 point each.

Finally we can choose to give the vehicle upgrades. These give it new special rules, or allow it to perform different actions. The Pulverizer clearly has a large ram on the front, so we spent 1 point on the Ram upgrade which gives it additional dice when performing a ram attack, making it excellent at clearing pesky light vehicles. This gives us a final cost of 16 points and the unit roster you see above.

But there’s no reason why you couldn’t make changes. Your pulverizer might have Autocannons instead of Autoguns, for 2 points per weapon, or you might decide to spend an additional point to make the crew Resilient, increasing their morale and making them hard to panic.

Classes also have a maximum cost, so if we look at the Pulvierizers angrier cousin the Murderbus, it costs exactly 22 points which is the maximum cost of a Heavy Battle Vehicle:

But what if we wanted to upgrade its autoguns to autocannons? We can then give it compromises. Each compromise increases the maximum cost for the vehicle, allowing you to purchase more weapons or upgrades. As the murderbus is literally a schoolbus with guns strapped to it, we could give it the Flammable upgrade, which counts all critical hits that don’t explode as On Fire, which would increase the max cost to 24, allowing us to buy those autocannons. Is this a good idea? Probably not5. Is it really funny? Yes.

Building Your Battlefields

So you’ve built a unit, and you’ve assembled 100 points worth of units for yourself and a willing victim friend, now you need somewhere to fight over.

At 3ft by 3ft for a standard game, Hypersteel Nightmare can be played on almost any table, and the 50pt skirmish game mode plays on a 2ft by 2ft board which fits on almost every table Ikea sell6.

The other benefit is that you don’t need an incredible amount of terrain. There are plenty of options for 3D printed options in this scale, but I am going to make two suggestions for cheap and easy terrain on a budget.

First is the TTCombat Cityscape, which at ยฃ30 contains more than enough buildings to play Hypersteel Nightmare, and the paper mat can easily be folded (or cut) to make the required 2×2 or 3×3 mats.

Or if something more durable is more your speed, consider Pendraken’s City Buildings bundle. At ยฃ55 it’s more expensive, but should give you enough buildings, when combined with some open space for parks or car parks, to fill a table. I am also slightly biased, as I designed these and you can see the original prototypes in the the rulebook.

Conclusion

Hypersteel Nightmare is a fast to play, highly customisable miniatures agnostic wargame. If you’re already an afficionado of small scale tanks or if you’re itching for an excuse to pick up a lance of battlemechs to show your PHR-loving neighbour what a real walker looks like, you’ve got no excuse.

I’ll round out this how-to guide with a short Q&A section, which will hopefully answer any remaining questions you might have.

Q: What if I don’t want 3-10 smaller units, but one giant unit like a Games Workshop Titan or a Gundam?
A: Hypersteel Nightmare includes rules for deploying Behemoths, single massive vehicles with a 100 point maximum cost, that are designed to fight entire platoons of vehicles.

Q: The game plays on a small area, how do planes work?
A: Flyers are split into Fast Movers and VTOLs. Fast Movers move on and off the board to perform attack runs or attack other aircraft, whilst VTOLs remain on the board but are visible from almost anywhere. Both provide a high degree of tactical flexibility, in a highly vulnerable package.

Q: I don’t like tanks. I like bugs. Is Hypersteel Nightmare right for me?
A: Anything big, armoured and angry is good with us. What is a Carnifex other than a walker anyway?

Q: What about infantry?
A: A new expansion, Hypersteel Meatgrinder7, is due out in late 2025 and adds new rules for infantry, transports and overhauled terrain rules to cover garrisonable and destructible buildings.

Q: Can I have a boat?
A: Sadly no. Or yes? Invent some new upgrades for boats, extend the secondary turret rules to make battleships, do whatever you like. The spirit of the game is invention. And if you do, email us about it or come tell us in Discord. We love to see what you’re up to.

  1. We are working on getting the appropriate documentation to be able to prove this for our EU customers, but we can provide proof on request via email. โ†ฉ๏ธŽ
  2. Any titan bigger than a Warhound is probably too large for regular Hypersteel, but would make excellent behemoths. โ†ฉ๏ธŽ
  3. PDF page 98, if your PDF reader doesn’t interpret page numbers correctly โ†ฉ๏ธŽ
  4. In an earlier draft, the sizes were Light, Medium and Heavy, but clearly we needed Superheavy and something had to give. โ†ฉ๏ธŽ
  5. This is actually probably a better idea than I give it credit for. Sure being on fire sucks, but it means it can’t be made immobile, and you can just panicked ram your way out of the panic the fire gives you. โ†ฉ๏ธŽ
  6. Please don’t email me because ikea sell a table too small. โ†ฉ๏ธŽ
  7. For the next couple of weeks at time of publication you can see playtest rules for Meatgrinder on the Epigram Games discord server. โ†ฉ๏ธŽ