Although GW “retired” Battlefleet Gothic (and the other “specialist” games) back in 2013, the community has kept it alive and it seems to be as well-played now as it ever was. I think this has a lot to do with the “open source” approach to game development that was trialled for BFG, with a “rules committee” guiding its development both during and after the period it was offically supported, and the vast range of excellent 3D-printed (or printable) miniatures that are available.

This community effort culminated in Battlefleet Gothic: Remastered, assembled by Simon Saier from the offical GW publications and FAQs and errata. BFG:R consists of two high-quality publications: a rulebook and a fleets list, which are all you need to play the game (apart from the usual dice, scenery, and some models).

While the PDFs are of superb quality, they are quite large, over 700 pages in total, and I’ve found that their sheer size causes problems while playing the game:

  1. I personally find a physical book easier to use while playing a game, but 700 pages would leave most home printers a smoking ruin, and having them printed commercially would do the same thing to my wallet; and
  2. A PDF can be quite difficult to scan through and search on a mobile device like a phone or tablet, when you’re in a rush to check a rule in the middle of a game.

So I decided to “scratch an itch”, and create an online version of Battlefleet Gothic: Remastered. It can be found at battlefleet-game.org.

The site uses the same open source backend that others have used to create online versions of miniature game rulebooks (IYKYK). I use a similar tool to publish this website, so it felt like an obvious solution. I also decided to follow the same approach used by those other sites, of omitting all the “fluff” and limiting the site to just the rules needed to play the game.

The content of the site is intended to exactly mirror the source PDFs. The only original content is the colophon(?), which describes the technical information about how the site is maintained, my editorial approach, and how users can report issues or provide their own contributions.

My plan is to maintain the site on an ongoing basis, so as and when the PDFs are updated, I will update the pages on the site to reflect those updates. That probably won’t happen very often with the rulebook, but the fleet lists are still a “work in progress”. Having said that, in the process of converting the rulebook PDF to Markdown, I found several errors in the original text, some of which date all the way back to the original GW publications, so maybe there will be some updates to the rulebook after all!

I have already found the site useful during my games, and I hope the wider community will too.