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

[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