Pirate Raid
Star Fleet Battles is another of my all-time favourite games. Again its the complexity of the rules, the number of options available to you in a turn, and the amount of support for the game that makes it so interesting to me.
Whilst refreshing myself of the rules and teaching someone to play I find myself playing through the Cadet Handbook scenarios (available from here). This guide teaches the very basics of the game, starting with just movement, and then firing different weapons (seeking and direct-fire), assigning damage and allocating energy. The rules for the complete game are far more complex and quite daunting to look at in terms of learning the game, but the Cadets Handbook again gives good advice on how to approach it once all the training scenarios have been completed.
We are playing Scenario 8 which introduces the concepts of tractor beams and transporters during an Orion raid on a freighter convoy.
I originally discovered SFB through mixing it up with another game called Star Trek: Starship Tactical Combat Simulator published by FASA. My friend and I played STSTCS as kids and going through a period of nostalgia I hoped to find the game again. I remembered it being a game of Star Trek spaceship battles, allocating warp points to shields, moving counters around hexes and so on. Searching online I discovered Star Fleet Battles and thought this was the game I had played. I bought it off ebay and really enjoyed the game. But something in the back of my head told me that the game I remembered had coloured pictures of spaceships on the counters, and couldn’t have been quite this complex a game seeing as we had played it aged around ten or twelve. Eventually I realised my mistake (and managed to find STSTCS on ebay as well!) but I liked the game of SFB so much I kept playing it and collecting the expansions.
STSTSC is a very much cut-down version of SFB in some ways. Though the energy allocation system is quite similar. STSTSC supplies all starship captains with a form (The Tactical Display?) on which counters represent the current values of warp engines, movement points etc. In fact is a far more representative system of energy allocation than the energy allocation charts of SFB. I find these quite confusing and often have to count back through a number of turns to recall how much power I have in my batteries and whether my phaser capacitors are charged. Bearing this in mind I considered how a similar tactical display could make energy allocation much easier in SFB.
I had a go at designing such forms for SFB and we are currently using the prototypes in our games. They do seem to make explaining the game much simpler. And they serve to record a number of other factors that have to be kept in mind – when a weapon was last fired in particular. They also do away with the SSD as they can be used to record damage too. The forms are in prototype at the moment (I keep finding extra boxes I need to add or changes that are necessary) and only cover the rules necessary to play in Cadet games but when they have been tested further I hope to be able to post up a a template and somee explanations of how they are used in our games.
Have you made any further innovations with the personalized energy allocation forms you mention in this entry?