THRACK
The wait is over. Today, Thrackdown, the fast-paced skirmish wargame of desperate fighters and brutal firefights on the broken colony world of Nova Eden, enters Open Alpha. Everything you need to play is available right now, and every word of it is free.
What is Thrackdown?
Nova Eden was once the shining jewel of human expansion. Then came the Collapse: the fleshcrafting experiments, the machine wars, and finally the moment the networks holding the planet together went silent. What remains is a patchwork of decaying settlements, industrial ruins, and fractured powers fighting over the bones of a dead future. You can dig deeper into the setting over on The World page.
Thrackdown puts you in command of a small warband, usually 6 to 8 fighters, drawn from the factions scraping power from the wreckage. Fighters activate one at a time, creating a constant back-and-forth where a single action can turn the tide of battle. Games are quick, tense, and personal. No armies. No front lines. Just your crew, the ruins, and whatever's hunting you through them.
And it's built for the tables people actually have. Thrackdown is kitbash-first: mismatched miniatures, converted models, and scratch-built terrain aren't a compromise here. They're the point. If your warband looks like it was assembled from salvage, you're doing it right.
What's in the Open Alpha
Everything you need to get a warband on the table today:
The full ruleset. The Quick Start Rules gets you playing in one sitting, and the Expanded Rules take you deeper: campaigns, injuries, experience, and the full weight of life between battles on Nova Eden. New to skirmish games? The first game walkthrough will take you through it step by step. Everything lives on the Play page.
Six launch factions, each with their own rules and unit rosters:
- The Ashen Covenant, knightly zealots awaiting the return of Regent Gideon Varr, marching in patched armour with unshakable faith
- The Iron Pact, disciplined paramilitary holdouts who reject the technologies that destroyed the world
- The Splice, the warped, unstable legacy of uncontrolled fleshcrafting
- Null Protocol, free machines and fragmented AIs who survived the Collapse, seeking meaning in the ruins
- The Crimson Veil, aristocratic gene-forged predators, striking with surgical precision behind screens of expendable thralls
- The Scavver Clades, resourceful salvage crews bound by nothing but survival and the code of the scrapmark
Custom Faction rules to forge your own minor power from the wastes will be coming as well, because not every banner on Nova Eden belongs to a great creed.
Scenarios ready to play, including Loot and Scoot: grab what you can and get out before someone grabs it back.
The Warband Builder
The centrepiece of the Open Alpha is the Thrackdown Warband Builder, a free, browser-based tool for building, validating, and managing your warbands.
Pick your faction, recruit your fighters, kit them out, and the Builder handles the rest: points totals, composition rules, equipment costs, the lot. It enforces the roster rules so you don't have to double-check them, from Leader requirements to Core-to-Specialist ratios and Juggernaut limits, and it runs entirely in your browser. No account. No app store. No internet connection needed once it's loaded. Open it and start building.
It works on desktop and mobile, so it's just as at home on the painting desk as it is at the table mid-campaign. And like the rules, it's free, now and always.
Free Forever
Let's be clear about the model, because it matters: the core rules and faction rules for Thrackdown will be free forever. Not free-for-now. Not free-until-launch. Free.
The plan is simple. If you love the game, there will be things worth paying for down the line: printed books, official miniatures, terrain. But the game itself belongs on every table that wants it, and a paywall in front of the rules helps nobody.
One more commitment worth stating plainly: every piece of illustrated art in Thrackdown is and will be human-made. You can read more about how we work on the Work With Us page.
What's Next
The Open Alpha is a beginning, not a finish line. Here's what's on the horizon:
Miniatures. The Ashen Covenant range is nearly complete, including variants across multiple unit types, and you'll be seeing a bit more of them soon.
Campaign play. A proof-of-concept mini-campaign is in the works, putting the campaign rules through their paces. More on that as it happens.
Balance updates. Units might get some adjustments based on how they play. This could be stats tweaks, special rule changes or points (Thracks) updates. Closed alpha testing helped a lot but this is where we need your help and feedback.
More content, steadily. New units, scenarios, and lore will roll out on a regular drip via the News page and the Changelog. And yes, there are things in the vault we're not showing yet. Keep an eye on the redacted strips.
You, hopefully. This is an Alpha, and that word means something. The rules will change based on what happens at real tables. Play the game, break the game, and tell us what happened. Every battle report, rules question, and "this unit feels off" message shapes what Thrackdown becomes. Find out how to pitch in on the Get Involved page.
Get Started
- Download the Quick Start rules and faction rules from the Play page
- Open the Warband Builder and muster your first crew
- Grab whatever miniatures you've got. They're perfect
- Play Loot and Scoot
- Tell us how it went
Nova Eden is waiting. It's not friendly, it's not fair, and it's absolutely worth fighting for.
Download the rules · Open the Warband Builder · Get Involved
Thrackdown is developed by Wargame Geeks Ltd. Core rules and faction rules are free forever.