1490 Doom's Starter Set Is Three Models Per Side and a Scaffold. That's the Point.

The design question 1490 Doom is answering is: what if a skirmish wargame stripped itself down to exactly what the premise required and nothing more? Three models per side. A round board. Vertical terrain. A rising fog of death that will eventually kill everyone regardless. According to the Gamefound project page, the game is set in a warped version of Europe between 1490 and 1494, where players lead Doom Companies — small bands of mercenaries in cobbled-together breathing gear — scrambling up ruins and throwing each other off high ground in a race to outlast a creeping apocalypse. It is a complete design philosophy baked into a setting, and it works precisely because Buer Games has not tried to make it anything larger than that.

What's in The Outpost at Meerbridge

Buer Games has now revealed the contents of the game's first physical starter set. According to Wargamer, The Outpost at Meerbridge contains four resin Doom Warrior miniatures — a fighter, a scout, a scavenger, and an assassin — alongside three MDF scaffold towers, an 18-inch circular cloth battle mat, a ladder, a resource cache, a pile of corpses, a learn-to-play booklet, reference cards, an MDF measuring stick, and dice. The scaffold towers are scaled to fit with the existing 3D-printable 1490 Doom castle set, so if you have already been printing terrain, the box slots directly into what you have built.

Four models is a defensible number here in a way it would not be for most games. As Wargamer notes, a full Doom Company only requires three models, so the box gives two players a functional starting point with one spare — enough to run different loadouts and figure out which archetype you actually want. The miniatures come monopose but with weapon options and empty hand variants, so you can match the physical model to whatever loadout you put on your roster. That is a small but meaningful concession to the fact that in a three-model game, individual equipment choices are not cosmetic — they are the game.

The Price and the Crowdfund

There is no confirmed price yet, but Buer Games stated on the Gamefound preview page that they "worked very hard to get this box under $100 without compromising on the components," and confirmed in their public Facebook group that the crowdfunder goes live in July. Sub-$100 for resin miniatures, MDF terrain, a cloth mat, and a learn-to-play rulebook is a reasonable ask for the format. For context, Trench Crusade — which TabletopXtra describes as one of the most talked-about indie skirmish games in the hobby right now — fields warbands of six to ten models, which means an entry cost ceiling that climbs faster. 1490 Doom's three-model company structure is a structural advantage for accessibility, not just a theme quirk.

Why the Scale Is the Point

The broader grimdark skirmish space has gotten crowded. Trench Crusade has a genuinely original alternate-history WW1 setting and free core rules. Games Workshop continues to sell the scale and brand recognition that indie publishers cannot match. What 1490 Doom is doing differently is making smallness a feature at every level of the design. The rules are stripped to their barest form—fast, decisive, and brutal—and the setting and rules reinforce each other directly: life in this dying world has been reduced to scrambling for the last remaining resources, and the game plays exactly like that.

The vertical combat system is the mechanical core that makes this work. According to OnTableTop's coverage of the game, the most victory points go to whichever Doom Company finishes with more models at the highest elevation — which means pushing your opponents off scaffolding is not just satisfying, it is the primary strategic objective. That is a tighter design loop than most skirmish games manage with ten times the model count. The round board reinforces it further: there is no corner to hide in, no battle line to anchor. Everyone is climbing the same structure and fighting for the same peak.

The Gamefound crowdfund opens in July. If Buer Games can hold the price under $100 and the learn-to-play booklet does what it needs to do, The Outpost at Meerbridge is a low-risk entry point into one of the more interesting design experiments in indie tabletop right now. Three models. A scaffold. A fog that will kill you all eventually anyway. That is not a stripped-down game. That is a focused one.