The Game Overview

The thing about this game is, I don't have it designed yet. I have ideas; some of them vague, some of them probably unworkable, a number of mechanics blatantly lifted from other board games, and a hodgepodge of other things coalescing into my "vision". Yeah, it's as messy as it sounds. The other thing I don't have yet are blog readers, followers and so forth. I hope to build up followers enough to talk strategy by the time I actually start running the game. To do that, I'll start designing the game publicly and hopefully pick up interested persons that way. Feel free to chime in if you think I've made something unworkable, or if you think I'm a doofus, or even in the rare event that you've got something nice to say.

But on with the design! I'm going to make this an interplanetary war. Or perhaps inter solar system, depending on how you care to define it. Lemme back into some descriptive text to give you the idea.

If they had known, would they still have run the experiment? That day ended the first golden age of interplanetary travel, in a war that cost billions of lives. But still, there's something about Pandora's box. Eventually somebody's going to open it. Sooner or later the temptation always proves too strong.

We could make it from planet to planet easy enough. All it took was energy, and time. But planets are very small things when there's a whole galaxy awaiting. And so we celebrated when we built our first star gate. The laboratory experiments proved no dangers, so we went ahead with the full scale model. A ring, miles across, outside the warping effects of gravity, capable of ripping spacetime open and propelling a ship from one star to the next as easy as a commuter is propelled form one subway stop onward. We opened it, and we were just about to send our research vessel through when they came.

The first ship was a surprise, an alien battleship of weird and unusual make blasting the assembled human fleet and taking the portal for it's own. The second ship was only too predictable. War had begun.

I like to listen to myself talk, don't I? But I'm sure you got the basic details down. Let's go for a bit more... factual description of this civilization of the future.

The main points on the game board are Earth on the near end and the Star Gate on the far end. Between all this we've got a solar system of objects, all the terrestrial planets, the moon, some more moons around different worlds, and the asteroids. Beyond that I want diverse space constructions; orbital factories, a star ladder, space habitats, space stations, asteroid mining operations, the works. The sort of solar system that Buck Rodgers would be happy to inhabit.

The war will take place with Earth on the one end attempting to manufacture navies to combat the encroaching hordes, and the encroaching hordes attempting to funnel enough units through the star gate to conquer the solar system before Earth can do so. One thing I specifically don't want to model is political infighting and maneuvering on the part of various Earth nations, so I'm going to assume for the time being that Earth is under a unified government. Stranger things have happened in science fiction. This leaves us with a functioning setting; we've got two rival powers fighting for mutually exclusive ends on a playing field large and complex enough to encompass our objectives.

Next time I intend to get into some more details. I could hardly get into less...