final frontiers

[quarrel]

“I fire one hundred points of plasma. You die.”
— legendary quote from some Star Fleet Battles tournament

“i was considering getting back into SFB, but then decided to punch myself in the nuts.”
— random forum comment

Playing Star Trek Online has got me eyeing the Star Fleet Battles rulebook again, not unlike Moon-Watcher gazing upon the monolith. I played it three or four times back in SoCal with a group of gaming friends I found after college.

To call the game “grognardian” is an understatement. It’s up there with Advanced Squad Leader in hoary complexity. The comprehensive Silver Anniversary Master Rulebook is over 400 pages long, and it’s just rules. No ship designs, no fleet lists, no scenarios or campaigns — just cross-referenced, clarified, and corrected rules aggregated from several major expansions going back to the Captain’s Edition, which is still the current base set despite its 1990 print date.

What’s the game’s appeal to me? The double-blind planning. The allocation of scarce resources. Reading your opponent’s mind (do you need to spend anything on counterjamming, or power your repulsors to avoid getting tractored?). The franchise, a little bit. The baggage layered on top of all that is paleolithic. I’d like to clear it away, but I can’t do that without re-familiarizing myself with things.

Thankfully, there’s a free introductory quick-start manual. It starts too simple (if you can believe that) but it picks up fast, touches on multiple races, and covers a scattering of minor ship systems like transporters (they use 1/5th of an energy point each), shuttles (launching or landing one occupies the relevant shuttle bay for the rest of this turn and all of the next), and labs (if you don’t have any, you can use a Bridge, Flag Bridge, Emergency Bridge, or Auxiliary Control as one instead…but not a Security Station, even though Security Stations are destroyed by Flag Bridge hits). This broad sampling is a wise choice, in my opinion. It gives a more accurate preview of the game as a whole and it provides for a greater variety of example scenarios. You can only play “blow up the other guys” so many times. Why not also see if you can evacuate a starbase in the midst of an overwhelming assault or analyze the Achilles heel of a killer space Bugle?

As to my pie-in-the-sky notions of creating my own simplified version of the game that approaches its complexity without requiring the memory of Perry Mason, it seems the company that makes it has beaten me to the punch, not once but three times:

One: Federation Commander. A streamlined version of SFB developed by the same company, intended for resolving fleet battles faster and for attracting less-hardcore players. It has its own free quick-start rulebook, and the comprehensive rules are only $15. I’ll probably buy them at that price.

Two: A Call to Arms: Star Fleet. The first Call to Arms was created for Babylon 5, and it won awards. That license has expired but the system is still around, having been refit last year both to the SFB license and to an unrelated science fiction RPG gameworld. I need to look into this one more. It has no free sample as far as I can tell and I haven’t found a detailed gameplay review yet.

Three: Starmada. This is a generic space fleet combat game with a line of officially licensed adaptations of SFB ships, races, and rules. Status is the same as ACtA: more info required.