Michael, so what was Game Z?

I know it became like a meme later on, but originally I thought Barnes was talking up an actual game. I remember this site and the blog before it used to hype Branham's Battle Beyond Space a lot. Then it was released and nobody ever talked about it again. Pretty sure it pre-dated Game Z anyways. Was it Earth Reborn? Was it never released at all?

Battle Beyond Space deserves to be talked about, but there's not really much to say - it's a perfect 45 minute multiplayer space battle game with very little drag and a lot of pew-pew-pew.

Only one of my gamer friends dislikes it and that's because he was expecting something a lot more complex. If it had been released by Parker Brothers it would be considered an all time classic.

My only kvetch is that the models can be hard to tell apart (both in colour for the Terran ships, and the ones where it's hard to work out the front from the back.)

Our local mail order games site Milsims still seems to have a number of cheap copies and I can't work out why - it's a great game for its particular niche.

Battle beyond space is really cool. It's got a lot of thunder road feel to it in the way you're just going around blasting literally everything. The cardplay is really cool, it's not unlike kingdom builder.

Game Z was never released at all. It came up a while ago in one of Barnes' blog entries that it was a game where you played Special OPs and had to raid places (like airplanes) to rescue hostages from terrorists.

A long time ago I wanted to make a Rainbow Six boardgame. I still might some day. I was picturing Descent but Spec Ops.

"I guess I can reveal it now since it’s a couple of years on. Game Z was a tactical dudes-in-a-hall game where you had Delta Force commandos taking on these REALLY awesome scenarios like saving hostages on a plane. The mechanics needed LOTS of work, but it’s the ONLY game I’ve ever played that had a Modern Warfare-style theme. It could have been huge with some development. When Zev pulled out the board and it was a freaking airliner that we were raiding, I was just like “oh yeah…”"

fortressat.com/reviews-toc/3721-barnesto...ion-comics-burl-ives

I once playtested a game for some folks. They had, I believe, a Tom Clancy license and were going to do...not really a CCG but more like that Pirates game with the punch-out boats. You had dudes and gear and stuff, and you were infiltrating bases and such.

It wasn't great, but what really killed it was that they insisted on range for weapons. As in, like, a rifle could shoot up to eight squares on the map, which meant it had a max range of something like 16 feet. There was just no getting around how idiotic and immersion-breaking this was, but they were hell-bent on it (because otherwise there was no way to make any one gun any better than another, they insisted.) There wasnever a second playtest session and the game never came out.

hotseatgames wrote: A long time ago I wanted to make a Rainbow Six boardgame. I still might some day. I was picturing Descent but Spec Ops.

I've got one half-built, but creating effective AI that works with complex board (destroyable terrain, cover...) isn't easy.

hotseatgames wrote: A long time ago I wanted to make a Rainbow Six boardgame. I still might some day. I was picturing Descent but Spec Ops.

SPI's "Commando" might be a place to start. I seem to recall playing it a bit sometime around '85-86, and it was sort of a hybrid RPG/tactical wargame played at the individual soldier level. It was kind of an odd duck published during a tiny window of time in which SPI flirted with publishing RPGs

My recollection was it was WAY more "tactical wargamey" than the military RPG we played at the time (Twilight 2000) and yet nothing like the sort of straight up "miniatures game in cardboard and graph paper" you have with the Cry Havoc games (the Standard Games medieval game from 30 years ago; not that overblown French minis game from a few years ago).

Odd game, though one we had some good fun with when I was 15...

Mmmm. I was always looking for tac level games when I was a kid. I bought SPI's Sniper! and some horrendous US game with really badly written rules...something like H Hour I think it was called. It was shit and costs me tons of money as I had to send US cash to the USA in an envelope to buy it. That's how desperate I was before the days of universal VISA/MC.

In those days it was illegal to take UK currency out of the UK (except in small amounts for holidays) and devilishly difficult to order from abroad. Before Squad Leader came out it was mostly a shit scene.

Yeah, it was that Rainbow 6/Delta Force/etc. game that Zev was looking at...the setup was awesome and at the time it was right in the middle of Modern Warfare 2 mania...it was the PERFECT time for a game like that, right as the whole military shooter thing was cresting in the video game world. But there was NOTHING with that theme in the tabletop sector, which made this game feel really unique.

The game itself, I don't remember that much about it other than it obviously needed a ton of development and some simplification. The mission design was really what was most impressive, and the AI was actually pretty good. It was obviously a sloppy, kitchen sinky design by a guy that just needed a good development partner to get the good stuff out of it.

Of course, now it could probably be released more or less as-is on Kickstarter and it'd make $100k.

The game was HORRIBLE as a game, BRILLIANT as an idea. The timing was good, too. It's under development now by another unknown and probably incompetent designer.

I guess instead we got Risk Battlefield Rogue.

Frak, I'd love to have that kind of game. The nearest I know for that type of gameplay is Deadzone, but it's still plagued by linear deployment and small area of operation.

(Infinity too, but it's still too free form).

SuperflyTNT wrote: The game was HORRIBLE as a game, BRILLIANT as an idea. The timing was good, too. It's under development now by another unknown and probably incompetent designer.

probably