Gamer Deep Lore, Exhibit #5. Star Fleet Battles.

"I have 30 points of Warp Power. Allocate 15 to speed ... 2 to Life Support ..."

The chits to the right are what the game looks like when played. Each tiny ship counter unfolds into a glorious flower of detail.

One of my favorite board games as a young was Star Fleet Battles, an intensely complex and detailed simulation spaceship vs. spaceship combat in the world of Star Trek. It was one of the glorious peaks of 80s grognard gaming madness.

This game is STILL IN PRINT. I don't know anyone who still plays it, but this combination of nerd bloodthirst and recreational math must be celebrated.

It’s only about 200 pages of actual rules. Get reading.

When I played, I had three volumes of rule books, a massive lump of text. They really wanted you to feel like you were operating a gigantic, complex ship. I was really good at this game. My secret power was that I, being a weirdo, actually read the rules and could quickly recall all the weird abilities my ship had. (Like, you can load your shuttles with explosives and launch them as tiny bombs.)

A fight of a single ship vs. a single ship took about an hour once you got used to the game. A huge battle, with a starbase and multiple ships, could easily eat up a full weekend. That is how we rolled in the 80s. At least this all took place in a room with other humans.

The ships were sold in little booklets. Each contained around 30 ships, from cute little frigates to massive dreadnoughts. No, televised Star Trek never had dreadnoughts.

Each ship on the board had a photocopied sheet describing it. The left half is reminder charts, with energy costs and weapon damage. The right half was your ship and all of its systems. As your ship took damage, you took a pencil and put X's in those little boxes. First the shields around the outside, then your weapons, etc.

You might be asking, "Is it as complex as it looks?" It sure is! Isn't it great!

(Also enjoy the 80s vintage Macintosh fonts and layout.)

Pay extra attention to Lines 7 and 8. If you forget 8, your guns don’t work. If you forget 7, your crew dies.

My favorite part of the game was energy allocation. Each turn, each engine nad impulse square in your ship generates one point of power. You must allocate it. Some to recharge weapons. Some for speed. Don't forget power for fire control and life support. There's a lot of math. Wonderful, wonderful math.

Some gamers will look at this and flee with terror. Some will go, "Recreational spreadsheets? Sign me up!" I don't want to start any arguments, but the people in the second category are better people.

To keep from needing to make photocopies, most people put this sheet in a clear plastic sleeve and wrote their power levels on it with a grease pencil. Gaming today doesn't use enough grease pencils.

I still have the sheets for the tournament ships. Tournament rounds were 1 hour, one on one. I won a tournament once, even though the judge ruled against me in a dispute where the rules were 100% in my favor and I was pointing at the exact rule in the rule book and yes I am still salty about it thank you.

Star Fleet Battles was really popular and had a ton of expansions, but it only had the original and animated series to draw from for material. Happily, it was a simpler, less anal-retentive time, so the designers just went off and introduced their own new Star Trek races willy nilly.

The Gorn? That rubber suit guy Kirk killed with a DIY gun? They have ships! So do the Kzinti, Tholians, and Andromedans, species who made very brief appearance. And then when they ran out of canon races, they simply created the ISC, Hydrans, and Wyn.

Then the real, grown-up Star Trek people decided to get serious about canon consistency, looked at what Star Fleet Battles had been up to, and went, "THEY DID WHAT!?"

Fortunately, Star Wars and Star Trek have really gotten control of their canon. Sure, all of the new product is mediocre or worse. But the lore is consistent!

Graphic design was their passion. Cute lil’ space slug.

Finally, I am tickled by the fact that the game has solitaire scenarios based on episodes of the old series. So it comes with four different counters for cute space monsters!

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Spiderweb Software creates turn-based, indie, old-school fantasy role-playing games. They are low-budget, but they’re full of good story and fun. You can still late-back the Kickstarter for our next game, Avernum 4: Greed and Glory.