Star Explorer

This time on the random walk through my game collection we come to one only recently acquired, Star Explorer.  There are two editions of this game.  The original, published in 1982 by Fantasy Games Unlimited; and the current version, published by Goblinoid Games as either a "download to play" digital copy, or as a print on demand title from The Game Crafter.  I have a print on demand copy, more on which below.

The basic game is essentially a Star Trek: original series adventure game.  Each player has a heavy cruiser that they use to visit planets on the galactic map, where they send down away teams to have adventures.  You have ten different types of crew, from navigators and fire control teams, to botany and geologic experts, to those poor saps in the military teams that die in droves (yep, you've got redshirts!).  Of course, it isn't actually a Star Trek game, because Paramount pictures won't just give that license away for free.  Because Fantasy Flight Games never got the license, they changed just enough things to give them plausible deniability if the lawyers ever came calling.  For example, the Klingon analogue is the "Zangids."  They are obviously Klingons, of course, right down to the artwork on the counters.  So you can easily just overlay Star Trek stuff onto the game if you prefer.

From a mechanical standpoint, this is a resource management game.  You start the game with a heavy cruiser with a basic equipment layout, as well as a complement of 25 crew teams.  You have some customization options with the specific crew you have, but you must have at least seven military teams and no less than one of the other nine types of crew teams.  You then get five "points" to spend to customize your ship, which can be extra crew, extra fuel (highly recommended), extra armor, extra weapons, extra transporters, etc.

Once your ship is equipped you fly it to one of the four planets on the map to have adventures.  One of the planets (randomly placed based on die rolls) has your primary mission on it, which you know about before the game begins.  All of the other encounters are randomly determined once you arrive at the planet.  Of course, sometimes getting to your destination is an adventure on its own.  To reflect this, each hex a player's ship moves on the map requires a roll of a six-sided die.  On a "6" you roll on the space encounter table to see what happens.  Sometimes it is a navigational hazard, sometimes it is a pirate or Zangid warship, and sometimes it is just news of something important that changes the game.  For example, in my first game, ON THE FIRST MOVE, I got a special event of increased Zangid activity, which meant that if I rolled a "1" while travling in a hex I had a 50% chance of encountering a Zangid warship that turn.  I ran into a lot of Zangid that game.

Combat is actually pretty fun and strikes a nice balance between simplicity and having to make strategic choices.  Before a battle starts you can choose to fight, parley/bribe, or attempt to run away.  If you successfully parley, you get full victory points without even having to fight your enemy, which is pretty awesome.  Of course, if you fail, they attack you at shorter range.  Running away loses you victory points, but sometimes you will die horribly if you don't.  Fighting uses beams and missiles to try to destroy the other ship's armor (though when you get it down to 25% they automatically run away).  Beams have a longer range but do less damage, while missiles are the inverse.  Every turn you choose how many shields to use and how many weapons to fire.  You can do critical damage that knocks out a ship component, and you can injure or kill crew, as well.  Whatever you use, it costs fuel, so you can't always just go in guns blazing.  I liked the decision making each turn to try to maximize your effectiveness while saving fuel.

On each planet you randomly roll a terrain type, and then you have up to three encounters (always a chance for three, but sometimes you will get a disaster instead, which is just something bad that happens).  You assign away teams to conduct each mission, and then you roll on the mission-specific tables from the rulebook to see what happens.  Success or failure, you are most likely going to lose some red shirts, which is thematically appropriate.  Good thing you have a lot of them!  I found this to be the most drab part of the game.  You can quickly figure out the optimal choices to make with your teams, and then it is just down to whether you get your die rolls or not to succeed.

You have to complete all encounters on all planets (or take a victory point hit for abandoning them) and then return to home base in 20 turns.  Completing things early gets you bonus points, while returning late costs you a points penalty.  While this game has counters for up to four players, I think it probably works best as a solitaire game.  Each player is really doing their own thing, as there is little interplay between the characters.  The only impact that having multiple players brings is that any special events rolled during space travel impact all players equally, and that if player one completes an encounter on a planet nobody else can complete it.  So there is a race going on for victory points, but if a player pulls ahead other players can't really do anything about it other than hope for a change in lucky die rolls.

Lastly, let me comment on the game components of the print on demand game.  Overall, I am not impressed.  The 20 page rulebook is 10 pages of double-sided laser-printed paper, with no binding at all.  The counter sheet is thick card laser printed, so you have to cut the counters out with a pair of scissors.  I personally find the counters too thin, and if I play this game in the future I plan to raid my Federation Commander game for counters.  the map board is also just laser printed card, and honestly does not look like it will hold up to a lot of play.  At least the dice are decent.

Overall, this game is okay.  It is fun, but the planetary missions get dry with the endless die rolling and looking up results on tables.  "Role-playing" it by coming up with personalities to be on each team would likely help in that regard, but at the cost of making the game take longer.  I do like the simple but effective space combat system, and blasting stupid pirates is fun, especially when you have shields and they don't.  Still, I'm not sure how much play this game will be seeing in the future.  It will probably only hit the table if I'm in a real Star Trek mood, which doesn't happen very often.

Blood & Thunder

The wargame Blood & Thunder was published 20 years ago (as of this writing) by Game Designers' Workshop.  Its theme and focus is warfare on the Eastern front during World War II.  The game includes close to two dozen scenarios, rules to design your own scenarios, and many different maps that can be combined in different ways, so there is a LOT of game in the box.  In fact, when I started reading the rules and looking at how the game was designed, I could not help but think that the whole project came from someone thinking that they liked the game Panzer Blitz, but felt that they could do more with it.  I was surprised at how similar some of the rules were, but where Panzer Blitz goes for simplicity, Blood & Thunder adds complexity on top.  Not a lot of complexity (the "rules" part of the rulebook doesn't exceed 16 pages), but enough to make me long for the simple yet effective mechanics of Panzer Blitz.  I also feel that this game suffers from a common problem with wargames of its era, where maps that aren't very large get filled by dozens of stacks of counters, such that you have to break out your tweezers to carefully lift counters off of stacks to see what is all in the stacks.  I quickly soured on games like this back in the day, and did not enjoy having to relive the situation.  Admittedly, you shouldn't have more than five counters in any particular hex on the map, but it still drove me to distraction.  Maybe I am just less patient about things as I advance in years.

Bottom line, I did not enjoy this game.  That may have as much to do with me as with the game, but there it is.  I am sure there are others who would enjoy this game, but it is not for me.  I have never cared much about gaming the Eastern front in WWII, and this game does not change that fact.

Updates on things

In no particular order:

• For anyone who reads this blog for the board game reviews, you will likely be waiting a while for the next one.  The next random game selected from my collection just hasn't grabbed my attention, and I keep finding other things to do instead of playing the game and writing about it.  I will eventually get to it, but I don't want to force play of the game when I'm not into it, as I will almost assuredly not give it a fair shake if I do that.
• I have made some good progress on my goal of reading 20 books in 2013.  Two finished this year, with a third book 3/4 read and a fourth book almost half read.  Looking good!
• I have also made good progress with getting back to playing the guitar.  I have been playing roughly three times per week so far this year, and I was very surprised at how quickly everything has come back to me.  It has been great to get playing again, with the exception of the annoyance of having to build callouses back up again on my left fingers.  Ah, well, "no pain, no gain," right?

The Spirit of the Sword

Today I finished watching the last episode of the Chinese TV show The Spirit of the Sword.  It was surprisingly good.  This show proves that I don't dislike soap operas, I just like them to have lots of sword fighting and martial arts mayhem, which of course American TV networks will not provide.  Oh, well.  If you like martial arts films I recommend giving it a try.  Also, you can get unintentional humor from the horribly bad English subtitles on the discs.  If you like what they show in the opening sequence, you should really enjoy the show.

Resolutions

I have never been big on the concept of "new years' resolutions."  I have always said that if you identify something that you want to change, just change it at the time you recognize the need for a change.  Don't wait for an arbitrary point of time in the future.  This probably represents me missing the point of taking the turn of the year as an opportunity to stop and think about what is working and not working in ones life, so I have actually taken some time over the last few days to think about what I want to accomplish in 2013.  I have come up with the following.

1. Play the guitar again - I haven't really played any of my guitars in probably five years, and I miss it.  There is a certain satisfaction in learning to play a new song or mastering a new chord structure that I only find in the guitar, so it is time to get at it again.  That being said, spending the first six months of 2013 building up finger callouses again will not be fun.
2. Read more books - I have always enjoyed reading, but often get pretty nonchalant about it, taking a few months to finish off one book, and I usually don't read more than a dozen books in a year.  I want to do better in 2013, which I can probably accomplish by playing less Football Manager on the computer.
3. Partly related to the above, I want to be more intentional about how I spend my time.  I often find myself puttering about the internet without purpose, wasting time that could be more profitably used elsewhere.  Even if I am playing a game or watching TV, I want to do so because that game is one I really want to play or that show is one I really want to watch, rather than it just being something I am doing without active thought.