Thursday, 28 May 2009 07:34
It's funny to me that STAR TREK and hobby gaming sort of grew up together- they got started in the 60s, grew popular in the 70s, and hit a peak in the 80s. And both wound up being exiled to parents' basesments by the mainstream by the 1990s. Both had become insular, nitpicky, and beloved by tubby weirdoes the world over. With the new movie out and hugely successful, I think there's a lot that board games could learn from the new TREK in terms of making a formerly fringe, nerd-dominated subculture popular and accessible again. Board games need more Beastie Boys and less "Row Row Row Your Boat". More sex appeal and less beards. More color and excitement and a lot less beige and bullshit "intellectualism".
Anyway, at Gameshark.com this week I'm looking at the three best TREK games out there, at least that I've played. I've not played the WEG STAR TREK III game but it looks pretty cool. Nor have I played any kind of STAR TREK trivia game, but I doubt I'd do well at one. It's high time somebody come up with the incredible STAR TREK game that I know is out there in the ether somewhere.
Oh, and Steve Weeks- I haven't forgotten about your idea for a column- we'll do that in two weeks. Next week is E3 so I don't anticipate doing a column since it's all going to be about that over there. Maybe I'll do a report from E3 if Bill Abner suddenly decides to give me his tickets.
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hancock.tom
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... Nice article... I used to love star fleet battles back in the day but I haven't pulled the trigger on federation commander yet. It may be too complex for me to get anyone around here to play it. |
moofrank
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... Thinking back to Star Trek games.... The mass market game that came out alongside The Motion Picture was decent. It was a pickup and deliver with just enough to make a reasonable game. Star Fleet Battle Manual is probably my favorite of the battle games. Targeting involves stretching a bit of fishing line across a tic mark on an oversize counter below the ship mini. It hits if it crosses your target. The complexity is about the level of Federation Commander, but with some Lou Zocchi wackiness. Red Alert was nice as well. The original Disk Wars space game. Except for the Zocchi game, I do agree with your picks. The only competitors might be the FASA Star Trek mini games. The Last Starfighter games were really good. I also have not played Star Trek III. Got one. The games do look good. And there is a trading game designed by John Ford ("So How Much for Just the Planet"). And the Sherwood Incident looks like a nice 2 player mini wargame with about 50 paragraphs. |
Bullwinkle
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... I'm thinking someone needs to take that ST adventure game and give it a good Arkham Horrorization. |
Space Ghost
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... Star Trek III is cool -- it has three solo adventures and I have found them all to be pretty entertaining. I asked about the Space Combat game about a week ago -- I think I will be going with Federation Commander. The group thinks it looks fun and I can probably force feed the extra nerdiness to them. Space combat comes with some sacrifices, damnit! |
Michael Barnes
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... That's what's funny about FEDCOM...it _is_ a lot more manageable than SFB and in fact I think it renders SFB completely obsolete. But it's still pretty darn complex. To be honest, I'm not sure I could play it without my pal Billy Motion sort of guiding me through all the impulses. It's a blast when you get it going though. I really want to get a copy of my own and some of the expansions, it's worth having around. Yeah, STAR TREK III had that solo Kobayashi Maru game, too...it looks like a nice set of minigames, I really should get it sometime. RED ALERT was kind of good. I gave all mine to Steve Avery, but I had some fun with it. I think the TWILIGHT IMPERIUM diskwars game was the same thing, they may even be compatiable. ARKHAM HORROR would actually be a good model for a TREK adventure game in a lot of ways...the only thing is that I'm not sure how you'd do the ship parts. Maybe if I talk to Richard he'll have a fully printed and designed prototype next week. |
Space Ghost
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...Was Mister Sulu there to give him a hand? It wasn't a hand that he gave him.... |
mjl1783
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... DAMMIT! I wrote an article when the movie came out called "A Tremendously Trashy Trio of Trek Titles," which was a review of the WEG Trek games, also, I threw in a little write-up of Dan Verssen's short-lived TNG collectible dice game, which is also cheap and totally worth picking up. I deleted it, though, because I figured nobody would want to read it. I never played FEDCOM, or SFB, but you're pretty much bang-on with regards to the WEG stuff. I really like The Enterprise4 Encounter. It was another one of those games my dad had collecting dust in his game cabinet for years, that I finally forced him to pull out and play. I just fell in love with the combat system. I'd never seen anything like it; it was so original and fun, unlike the boring "let's see who rolls more skulls" crap we were playing at the time. It was the first game that led me to believe that my dad's dork board games weren't all bad, and maybe I should give them another chance. Of course, ST:TAG also holds one of my fondest gaming memories. I was playing the Klingons, and I landed on this planet where the population was supposedly heavily-armed or something. I had the choice between being diplomatic, or going in guns blazing. I decided on the latter. "Are you sure you want to do that?" My dad asked "The book doesn't make it sound like a good idea." "Well," I said, "I'm the Klingons, right? Isn't that what Klingons do?" So we flipped to the next paragraph, the planet totally submitted to my awesome power. I think I might even have enslaved them. Damn, that was fun. |
Michael Barnes
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... You snooze, you lose! Post your articles! SUBMIT! I'd still like to see what you've written. I almost wish someone (ahem, FFG) would snatch up the Eon design for ENTERPRISE ENCOUNTER because it's got this cockeyed brilliance that really goes beyond it being a TREK game. It could be _the_ western-themed game in the right hands. The battle mechanic is _perfect_ for a one-on-one gundown. I think the game is really underrated, as a simple card game it has a lot more going on than usual in typical take-that fare. It does seem that in ST:TAG that you are rewarded for acting appropriate to your side...but there's a couple of surprises that shake that up a bit. |
Shellhead
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... Somehow I picture Zev of Z-Man being more likely to pick up the rights to an OOP Star Trek game. Just seems more up his alley than FFG's somehow. |
ironcates
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... I bought a bunch of Star Trek Collectible Dice on ebay after I picked up Dragon Dice. Actually the Star Trek Dice game isn't collectible. I haven't completely wrapped my head around the rules and I can't find anyone to play with me so I'm kinda waiting for my kids to get old enough to play. I know it's a sad story. |
Death and Taxis
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... An accessible modern Star Trek game would be a welcome addition to my collection. Nothing in your review sounds like anything I would go out of my way to hunt down. FedCom sounds appealing but I doubt I would be able to get it on the table with the people I game with. Oh, and I have a Star Trek themed 3D Chess set as shown in the picture above because I'm a Star Trek Nerd. I would totally kick Spock's ass all over the bridge if he dared to challenge me. |
mjl1783
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...I also have not played Star Trek III. Got one. The games do look good. And there is a trading game designed by John Ford ("So How Much for Just the Planet"). And the Sherwood Incident looks like a nice 2 player mini wargame with about 50 paragraphs. Actually, John Ford wrote the backstory for the two games. The design is credited to Costikyan. Sherwood isn't really what it appears to be. The paragraph book is really just a ridiculously padded random events table. You don't get to choose between two courses of action. You just roll on the table, look up your entry in the book, read the pointless flavor text, and get your result which could've just been ON the table to begin with. That's just one of a thousand process headaches you have to deal with. If you're in the right mood, and have a lot of patience, it's OK, but not worth having the game for. The trading game is a bit better, and I do play it from time to time, but it hasn't aged very gracefully either. The Kobayashi Maru game, on the other hand, is_awesome_. Now, I'm actually not what you'd call a Star Trek fan, but this one really puts you in the captain's chair, so to speak. You've got all the characters controlling their specific stations, just like on the show, and you have to decide how much power you're going to allocate to shields, sensors, and the like. The more of the ship's systems you use, the more likely you'll attract the Klingons. When you go into combat, you put the Klingon ships on this grid which is supposed to represent the Enterprise's viewscreen. When you move, you move ALL the targets on the grid in the opposite direction you turn, so you get a first person perspective. Of course they move around too, and fire photons which you try to shoot down before they hit you. It's almost like a board game version of Wing Commander, and it totally works. |
ubarose
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... The problem with ENTERPRISE ENCOUNTER is the box looks so dorky that even the F:ATies at Trashfest wouldn't play it with me. |
Bulwyf
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... Good article. The part about FedCom gave me some serious SFB flashbacks. Way back in junior high my friends and I got into SFB in a major way that lasted until the end of high school. Those were some good times. Hell, even the rules arguments we would get into were fun. And trust me there were a lot of them. Here's hoping a great new Star Trek game is out there. -Will |
Andy Kelly
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... Fed. Commander sounded like fun until I looked at one of the ship cards. Good Lord, that's a lot to keep track of. One game that I expected you to mention is Star Fleet Battle Force. It's based on a naval combat card game and has the same weird licensing issues as FEDCOM (same ships, races, etc., but no mention of Star Trek). It's light but fun, and it's still fairly easy to find on ebay. |
mikoyan
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... I've only heard about Fed and Empire and Star Fleet Battles. A friend of mine has Fed and Empire and one of these years I might get a chance to play it. While Star Trek itself can be slow and comtemplative, the space battles are not and it doesn't seem like any of the games reflect that. |
Michael Barnes
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... The problem with ENTERPRISE ENCOUNTER is the box looks so dorky that even the F:ATies at Trashfest wouldn't play it with me. Are you kidding? Who could see that and NOT want to play it? I screwed up in the article, I said it was Chekov on there. It's clearly Scotty. That's what I get for not bothering to dig the box out of the closet to look at it before I started writing. Fed. Commander sounded like fun until I looked at one of the ship cards. Good Lord, that's a lot to keep track of. Yeah, they're daunting...but once you use them for a game, they make sense and you see how they're actually more helpful than harmful. If I had to get into the game by myself and without Billy Motion kind of helping me, I probably would have been scared off by those things. But hey, they cut out like 90% of the energy allocation thing from SFB, so it's a good compromise. One game that I expected you to mention is Star Fleet Battle Force. It's based on a naval combat card game and has the same weird licensing issues as FEDCOM (same ships, races, etc., but no mention of Star Trek). It's light but fun, and it's still fairly easy to find on ebay. I actually forgot about this one. It's not bad, it is very much a NAVAL BATTLES style game with TREK ships. If you like NAVAL BATTLES and TREK, it's probably going to be one to look for. I think it's actually still in print, I was able to order a copy from a distributor for AGF so it may be in circulation. |
ubarose
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...The problem with ENTERPRISE ENCOUNTER is the box looks so dorky that even the F:ATies at Trashfest wouldn't play it with me. Yeah, well, ENTERPRISE ENCOUNTER may be one of the three best Star Trek games, but it just couldn't compete with THUNDER ROAD. It was a live Trashdome beat down. Three times. Then it got snubbed in favor of SMALL WORLD. Now that was embarrassing. |
moss_icon
said:
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... i don't want my nerd dominated subcultures to become popular and accessible. i don't want trendy fuckers pretending that they are punk rock because they have a t-shirt of some shitty band and a £100 haircut. i don't want them thinking they are down with the geeks because they have a sweater vest and thick black specs and saw an episode of flight of the conchords once and pretended they found it funny. fuck people from commodifying my subculture (it barely qualifies as culture, i must admit) to make money off it and get laid. those fuckers are fucking arseholes. we are the geeks, the outcasts, the misfits. all those bastards who mocked me roundly at school for being into computer games now play xbox and wii because it's cool. they dawdle in computer games stores, getting in the way because they haven't a sodding clue as to what game they were told to buy this week as they are so fucking stupid and could have bought it off the internet for 50% less. i hate those wankers. |
Michael Barnes
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... I hear you on that- I remember the first time I walked into a Hot Topic and saw shirts for the Exploited, Subhumans, and...CRASS. Shit I had to hunt down and mail order back in the day because you couldn't buy it in a store. Then there was the tiem when suddenly Misfits stuff started turning up EVERYWHERE. And then there's the $150 (literally) designer Motorhead shirt I saw once...properly "aged" so it looks somehow authentic. I saw somebody like Britney Spears or one of those Olsen twins wearing it once. Somehow, I doubt they've ever bought a copy of "Ace of Spades". Oh, and then there's the designers that are using old logos and band imagery for their stuff...I saw this guy wearing what looked like a very expensive T-shirt (like one of those stupid Affliction things) that had the old Suicidal Tendencies logo. It was not a Suicidal Tendencies shirt though. If I were Mike Muir, I'd be firing up some litigation. Nike tried to do this shit recently with the classic cover to Minor Threat's LP, using it as an ad. MacKaye and company threated to sue, and they pulled it. But I do think something like STAR TREK is different. It was mainstream to begin with, and it should have remained mainstream all along. That it became dominated by a bunch of really creepy nerds is pretty unfortunate since it hampered the property's growth and really kind of killed it off by the 21st century. |
mjl1783
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...i don't want my nerd dominated subcultures to become popular and accessible. i don't want trendy fuckers pretending that they are punk rock because they have a t-shirt of some shitty band and a £100 haircut. Well, if punk rockers hadn't gone to such great pains to dress the same as one another, there would be no "look" to copy. In fact, if punk rockers hadn't introduced the ridiculously idiotic notion of BEING punk rock, nobody would pretend to be it. Don't bitch about punk rock being trendy. It's trendy because it embraced stupid fashion trends and affected coolness from the get-go. all those bastards who mocked me roundly at school for being into computer games now play xbox and wii because it's cool. they dawdle in computer games stores, getting in the way because they haven't a sodding clue as to what game they were told to buy this week as they are so fucking stupid and could have bought it off the internet for 50% less. i hate those wankers. Is this a joke? Are you seriously suggesting that people go out to Gamestop and look for the latest trend in gaming so they can appear hip and get laid? Come on, man, I know it chaps the ass a bit to see things for which you used to get made fun of suddenly become more socially accepted, but god damn, who cares? |
Andy Kelly
said:
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... The nerds killed Enterprise. It was OK, not great, but it was Star Trek on my TV, and the fanboys nitpicked it to death. I'm wholly in favor the new Star Trek because its success means there will be more movies and maybe more Star Trek on my TV. I would tune in for Star Trek: Reliant or whatever, and I'm looking forward to fucking up my son with Star Trek the way my dad fucked me up. Having said that, I can also say that it hurts a little to see my hobby-horse tarted up and sold to the filthy masses. They don't understand Vulcans the way I do; they don't know about Zefram Cochrane; they don't know that Winona Ryder (Spock's Mother (!)) is my secret, shoplifting wife. So bring on the mainstreaming of Star Trek. I would love to see a boardgame implementation of the Bridge Commander computer game. |
Hex Sinister
said:
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... I would love a new Trek game to come out along the lines of what was discussed here. I don't even care if it re-hashes old concepts as long as it was all collected together into an awesome game. I doubt that it would be mainstream or sexy though. When mjl was describing the Kobayashi Maru game it reminded me of the Star Trek RPG from the 80's. I only read it and that was over two decades ago. Anyway, that had console player mats for each major bridge station like engineer, helmsman, science officer, even communications. Pretty cool concept - the captain basically tells what the fuck he wants to happen and everybody else is assigned power from engineering to allocate with sliders on their charts. I think damage was allocated on there too. So it's like SFB/FedCom resource allocation but parted out to individual crew players. If someone could refine that idea and meld it with a multi-player adventure type game it could be fucking sweet. Call it "Space: The Final Frontier" not Trek. Cards could have crisis scenarios, diplomacy stuff, border patrol missions, space monsters etc. (From what I've read Space Alert comes close to this but it's just not Trek. And it looks kind of... ugly) But it needs to be Trek but WITHOUT the characters from the show. It needs to be generic Star Fleet action that places YOU at the helm. I think there's more immersion that way. YOU want to be running the ship and making the important desicions, not playing fucking Kirk. Yeah, you can think along the lines of "WWKD?" in crazy space encounters but in the end the fun is imagining it's yourself at the controls. Part of what I don't like about liscenced games is how they always have to use stock photos from the tv series or movies. For instance, there are only so many photos of a Klingon D-7 Battlecruiser to show repeatedly. I don't want to see those same re-used photos of the same old scenes over and over. Who wants to see 40 year old pictures of Kirk again and again? Another problem with this is that you can be limited to the shit that happened in the series/movies. It's so restricting. I think original artwork that is packed with Federation Flavor would be the way to go. What I like about SFB universe (including FedCom) is that they DON'T use photos from the series. Yet, it's still packed with the Trek flavor without the baggage. The ship designs seem like a logical extension from ships shown in the series. You could actually believe that these ships and races could have existed in the show. |
catweazle
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... What I like about SFB universe (including FedCom) is that they DON'T use photos from the series. Yet, it's still packed with the Trek flavor without the baggage. The ship designs seem like a logical extension from ships shown in the series. You could actually believe that these ships and races could have existed in the show. I thoroughly agree. Its about flavour and game-play, not trying to perpetuate the franchise! After reading this article I'm very tempted to try FedCom; now I just have to find some opponents (PBM anyone?)! |
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