Do you play non-PC/console space combat games ?

[Gryphin]

havent played a board game for years. more for lack of opponents than ought else.
I would love to take on someone local in GEV / Ogre.
Oh well EDEE.

[Loser]

I have the box. Aerotech was the first FASA space combat game. They made another later, I think it was jsut called Jumpships and Dropships. They were both ... heavy.

The Areospace map had little arrows on it to indicate the way your ship was affected by gravity, it was actually very clever. Just... complicated.

[Mephisto]

Originally posted by Loser:
The Areospace map had little arrows on it to indicate the way your ship was affected by gravity, it was actually very clever. Just... complicated.

Yea, the arrows are still there. The use a real space thrust system. If you go one way you have to spent thrust to counter your movement. This is quite nice but still, in the end all you do is to ire your weapons each turn, hope that you inflict more damage then your enemy and that your armor is thicker then his. No ECM/ECCM nor damage control, no targeting.

[Joachim]

Originally posted by Erax:

I am curious about Full Thrust, I have heard nothing but praise for it.

Full thrust is an excellent minatures game. It is deceptively simple yet horribly addictive (I have a large painted fleet). While the mechanics of the system are easy - all d6 driven and check a box for damage - it gives the feel of space battle. You can knock over 20 v 20 ship battles in a couple of hours - with or without beer

The rules are easy to read, understand and well set out. If people want a figure space game without the nightmare complexity of say star fleet battles (own all that too) which give the correct feel then I cant recommend Full Thrust enough.

[Parasite]

I am a big fan of SFB (Star Fleet Battles). In fact, I was searching around in the SFB web site where I found the link for SEIV which effectively changed my life.

I have also played Silent Death, AeroSpace, and a few other less known boardgames. I even have a game called "Rebellion on Mars" or "Battle at Mars", something like that. It has hidden fleet movement around the solar system. When ships do fight is uses REAL Newtonian physics to move the ships. i.e. your ship has a speed vector and your engines only adjust that vector as you move and apply thrust. The map then moves at the average of all the vectors. I played a few games of it solo, but it is not much fun playing solo against yourself using hidden fleets. It was too complex for most other people to play. It was fun and used realistic physics for everything.

[Ed Kolis]

Never actually played this one (and neither has my dad!) but my dad has a really weird game called "Starforce Alpha Centauri"... how weird, you ask? OK, first of all, propulsion in this game is not done using engines... instead, specially trained crew women (only women, it doesn't work with men) use their psionic powers to move their "Starforces" (all ships are tracked in fleets of 4, unless you're playing the advanced game, in which you can split them up into "Fakerforces" of 1-3 ships) around... combat does not involve cannons or beams or missiles or anything, but instead "combat casting", something akin to the Telekinetic Projector... and - get this - the game's in 3D, but the Z position of your opponent's ships is hidden from your view, so an enemy Starforce could be one "lite-zulu" away on the board, but really be 20 "lite-zulus" away on the Z axis!

Now you see why we never played that game?

[SpaceBadger]

Originally posted by Ed Kolis:
Never actually played this one (and neither has my dad!) but my dad has a really weird game called "Starforce Alpha Centauri"... how weird, you ask? OK, first of all, propulsion in this game is not done using engines... instead, specially trained crew women (only women, it doesn't work with men) use their psionic powers to move their "Starforces" (all ships are tracked in fleets of 4, unless you're playing the advanced game, in which you can split them up into "Fakerforces" of 1-3 ships) around... combat does not involve cannons or beams or missiles or anything, but instead "combat casting", something akin to the Telekinetic Projector... and - get this - the game's in 3D, but the Z position of your opponent's ships is hidden from your view, so an enemy Starforce could be one "lite-zulu" away on the board, but really be 20 "lite-zulus" away on the Z axis!

Now you see why we never played that game?

I had this game - still do, I guess, in a box somewhere. It was part of the StarForce Trilogy from SPI. I remember the ground combat game of the trilogy had one scenario where you had to send your squad out to kill or capture a marauding alien beast that teleported randomly around the map. The beast was called a dinkblog, but we didn't get the joke until later, when we started playing D&D. (This was mid-70s, and we didn't discover D&D until 1978.)

The third game of the trilogy was a large-scale strategic colonization game, with the map representing about 1/4 of the Milky Way galaxy. I'm not sure what scale that made each hex, but it was huge. No individual star systems at all, just vast stellar regions of varying density and value. Not a very detailed game, but it was the best we had of its kind at the time. I seem to recall adding a lot of homebrew rules to make it better.

Hmm, ya know, I don't think we ever actually played StarForce Alpha Centauri, either.


SpaceBadger