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Aetherpunk28 is a 28mm skirmish game of wizarding warfare — think World War I, but everyone is a wizard. Magic is a physical resource that's running out and colleges of wizards are fighting over what's left. You play with a small number of individual models in PvP, PvPvE, co-op, or solo games. Easy to play as a one-off, but also includes multiple rich narrative campaigns. Digital rules, including all expansions, are free.
You command two to twelve individual models on a 3×3 ft table in objective-focused games. You will use D4 through D12 in a normal game, always trying to roll 6+. Higher value dice increase your chances, and multiple dice allow for more successes.
Big part of the gameplay revolves around erudite charges — the waning magical substance that you accrue and spend. In the early turns, you'll be throwing spells around like a demigod drunk with power, but by turn three, you might end up hiding behind a barricade, trying to squeeze out any remaining bits of whatever magic you still have left.
Activations alternate between players, but because of the reactions mechanic, you're never stuck just waiting around. Getting shot at? Summon a golem next to your enemy, ready to punch them in the head in the coming activation.
Once you get comfortable with the core mechanics, there are many additional layers that you can add to make the game quite crunchy. Add NPCs that wander the map (a child lobbing rocks trying to spoil your casting, a farmer with a shotgun), landmines, fortifications, and loads more.
Then there are the connected and modular campaigns: take your college from their first steps outside the capital, through a bank heist in the vampiric baronies, to an epic fortress assault, all the while earning medals or capturing relics that carry over from one campaign to the next.
Aetherpunk28 sits on a sliding scale from whimsical to WW1 grimdark, and it is up to you to pick a spot on that spectrum. The game is low-model count (usually 3–7 models), so getting a playable force is easily a weekend project. Terrain requirements are low (the game works with both dense and sparse terrain), so that doesn't need to be an obstacle either.
Aetherpunk's fantasy/historical overlap means that wizards, historical WWI kits, and many fantasy miniature sets slot right in. Your unifying signifier is the pointy hat. Glue one on any historical/fantasy soldier and you're in business.
Base sizes are most commonly 32mm, but 25mm–40mm are also used by some units. Base sizes do slightly affect cover and measuring, but the effect is so small you don't really need to worry about it.
The official STL range covers many bits packs (there are over 50 different pointy hats available in several themed kits!), but there are also whole units, creatures (the infamous vampig!) and characterful standalone wizards. Vae Victis miniatures released an official Aetherpunk collaboration multi-part set, which is another great place to get started.
The game can be played with both dense and sparse terrain, but which way you go will determine what shines. Tanks and armour love a flat, open table — the moment there are towers, cliffs, pits or rock piles, elevation makes punching through armour easier and tanks get less powerful.
General advice is to use a few pieces of light cover, a few of heavy, and keep it mostly out of the deployment zones so the interesting stuff sits in no man's land. You might also want to include some troublesome terrain like thick mud, and treacherous terrain like minefields. And yes, trenches are definitely on-brand.
The official terrain STLs lean into the crossover fantasy/WWI terrain mix, with a crashed Zeppelin, barricades and a wizard tower bunker.
Pick a college, take a wizard, spend shillings. Fifty shillings is the standard game which usually gives you between five and seven models. You have access to a pool of universal units plus your college's own specialists — usually one per faction. Units can be augmented with gear, items and weapon swaps.
There are no hard counters in the game, but there are meaningful counterplays — field guns and tanks are brutal at range and fall apart in melee, so even a shooting college wants someone with a crowbar or a shovel. If you want to test-drive factions before you commit, build a list with no college-specific units at all (two sloggers, a wizard and a tank, say) and run with different colleges to see how they feel on the table before you commit.
Aetherpunk28 is post-apocalyptic in the sense that the magic of its world is dying. It's a finite physical resource, and the wizarding colleges hoarding it to hold onto power are draining it faster (there might be some relevance to the real world here, who knows...). "Wizard" is a race, not a job title: there are no humans, but there are dwarves, trolls, goblins, gnomes and more.
One really unique aspect of Aetherpunk is that the lore grows with the player base very directly. Gazette (expansion) topics are chosen by community vote, short stories are open submission, and the college census at the back of Second Edition was written entirely by players. Even some real-world events feed directly in: Grimsby hosts Aetherfest every six months, so Grimsbay now exists in the setting as a town whose ruler changes twice a year. A player-submitted piece established a golem union campaigning for equal rights.
Contradictory interpretations are welcome — golems are prototypically from clay, but no one in the community will try to argue that cheese-based golems are not canon, they just haven't met them yet.
Content for this page was written for Indie Tabletop Club by Artur Muller, based on an interview with Jack Edwards in September 2026 and the content of the Aetherpunk 2nd edition rulebook. Images used with permission.