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Jason FarrisUnited States
Fair Oaks
California
There is a duck in every game. You may not see it, but it's there.
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Since I’m waxing nostalgic today about the good old days of video gaming on the PC when everything was incompatible with everything else (thank you VESA for my sanity), I thought I’d talk about the board game that inspired one of my favorite PC games of the era, Lift Off. Any of you who remember the bad old days of searching for compatible drivers mare remember a title called Buzz Aldrin’s Race into space. The core mechanics of the PC game lifted (pun intended) from afore mentioned board game. And it was frighteningly addictive. It was also frighteningly tough. If you did not save early and save often it was almost impossible to beat. But it kept you coming back for more every time.
The premise of both the board game and computer game is the space race from the early days of Sputnik to the eventual moon landing. You are the director of your country’s space program and must win prestige by completing increasingly complex and dangerous missions into space. You have to spend money to buy new programs (e.g. satellites, capsules, rockets) and then spend more money on research to make them more reliable. You also get to buy astronauts. You get a bigger budget when you successfully complete a space mission which allows you to buy new programs. The winner is the player who successfully manages a manned lunar landing and return to earth before anyone else.
There are several ingenious mechanics that ensure the game will keep you excited and begging for more. First, you are always competing against safety vs. the desire to be first into space. All missions have steps in them based on difficulty and each step requires you to roll percentile dice against a particular component. For example My capsule rating for my satellite may be 60% which gives me better than average odds it will succeed in the one test it will make if launched. Do I launch it now to get ahead of the competition and risk it exploding in space or wait until R&D can make it safer. The push your luck aspect is delicious. Since everyone chooses their launch dates secretly, you never know when someone will scoop you on a mission. Also the game has a tech tree to it to appeal to the builder of the gaming group. Many components give you an increase in safety for more advanced components. For example, if I have an atlas rocket program, and a titan rocket program, then my newly purchased Saturn program will start with a much improved safety factor (requiring less R&D time and money to get it ready to fly).
If I go on much more about the game, I will be writing a review. So why has this game not been reprinted? I think two factors play into it, components, and the need for writing things down. Nobody likes games with a lot of book keeping, and this game requires it for marking down your missions and launches to recording your astronauts experience. I think a lot of the book keeping in this game could be mediated by modern component design but there would still be some.
The other problem is the bits. How can bits keep a game from being reprinted? Well, the bits may have been passable for the time, but they are horrendous now. This games needs love and a lot of it. It’s very hard to this game to the table and be taken seriously in the modern multi-colored world. And nobody playing it means nobody clamoring for it to be reprinted.
What I wouldn’t give for a properly pimped out version of Liftoff. I think this deserves the Stronghold treatment.
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