From: Phillip Atcliffe <Phillip.Atcliffe@u...>
Date: Mon, 26 Jan 1998 12:34:31 +0000
Subject: OT?: Alien Space
> Winchell Chung wrote: > Alien Space was a marvelous game! I recall many happy hours nailing Oh, gods, this brings back _so_ many memories. Alien Space was the first SF game I ever played (StarForce was the first one I _owned_). The Melbourne Uni SF club had a copy, and we used to get together in the evenings about once a month to play our own version, using "counters" mounted on tiles, which gave them some robustness. The game was basically a get-the-other-side's-base, with each team having one of each kind of ship in the rules, plus a base that we invented (_18_ blazers -- Nasty!). It took hours to play, and I only think we ever finished one game, the others winding down as both sides got too battered to attempt a base assault, but we had so much fun..! Of course, half the time we were struggling to keep a straight face because there were so many in-jokes that stemmed from the... shall we say, idiosyncratic manner in which one of the players had typed up the rules for distribution. To this day, I have to think twice if someone mentions the "Tentical Beam" or the "Electron Stalker Pods" (the real names of 2 weapons), because we always called them the "Tenticlee" beam and the "$torcker" pods after wonderful typos. > In addition, each ship was from a different race, and had a unique Yeah, well, there's a reason for that. This is possibly apocryphal, but the way I heard it went like this: Lou Zocchi wanted to publish a Star Trek game, but he either couldn't get or couldn't afford a licence, and Paramount would sue his socks off if he tried without (expensive) permission, so he took his already designed game and changed the artwork and names. The Enterprise became the "Earthship" with "proton torpedoes"; the Romulan became the... oh frak, I've forgotten the name, but it was sub-light, had an invisibility screen and the dreaded "magma beam" (which made for an entertaining "Murphy's Rules" entry in an issue of Space Gamer about the "USS St Helens"...); what the Klingons became, I never knew, although Lou seemed to think that they would carry _lots_ of guns, so I suspect the Kuzi, which had 10, instead of the usual 6, "blazers". Other things like the use of warp speeds also proclaim the unacknowledged ST influence. Later, of course, Lou managed to get a licence of sorts through Franz Joseph (as did the Star Fleet Battles people), and he brought out the Star Fleet Battle Manual, which was basically Alien Space tweaked a bit to make the official ST races a little different to the AS ships. The SFBM included rules to allow the two games to be played together, and the excellent cover painting showed Federation ships cruising past (and firing on) two Kuzis! I really wish Lou had brought out the AS miniatures that he talked about, but I don't think they ever were made. Shame -- I wanted a fleet of them. Interestingly, later, Lou apparently managed to incorporate elements of Star Wars into one of his RPGs, and got away with it because he was considered too small to be worth suing. Which may say something about Paramount and Lucasfilm. > Fascinating game. Just plain fun! It also lent itself to all sorts of new rules. I invented several different ships for the game, including one based on the B7 Liberator (and one for its little brother), and we boosted the weapons of some of the original ships -- the Earthship's proton torpedoes were just too weak, for instance. And then there were the hyperjumps... the only game that we ever finished (i.e., that one side won, by destroying the other side's base station) was the first time we tried the hyperjump rules. The endgame was a real mess (tiles stacked 4 and 5 deep!), but it was a truly nail-biting finish -- would we kill the base before it took out the attacking force one by one (18-strength blazers will kill almost anything!)? We did, but it was a close thing -- and probably more fun than I've had in a game in a long time. Phil, a Dort fan and Gapper Zapper ace...