Wargaming The Expanse

I'm watching the sixth season of The Expanse, a great hard sci-fi TV series based on a great hard sci-fi book series. And thinking about how to game it out. In this setting, ships have to change their direction of thrust to change their vector--no Star Trek- or Star Wars-style swooping about. And while Galactic Knights does a good job of representing vector movement, it doesn't really convey the sense of planetary distances on a solar scale that I get from The Expanse. That's where Triplanetary. the Steve Jackson Games rerelease of the Game Designers Workshop classic space combat boardgame, comes in.

This game has a map of the solar system (including the Belt) out to Jupiter, takes planetary gravity fields into account, and has counters enough to account for all the polities in the setting: white with blue and red markings (United Nations of Earth and Luna) red with black markings (Martian Congressional Republic Navy), and black with white markings (Outer Planets Alliance). There are also some blue with white counters to represent noncombatants, and about a dozen colors of corvettes for unique spaceships (like maybe the Rocinante or the Razorback). This setting and these counters would make a good multiplayer scenario for a convention game, with each side having different goals. Anyone else thought of anything like this?

FnordCon day 1

Three weeks ago I attended FnordCon, the first-ever convention put on by Steve Jackson Games. That morning I ran a game of Triplanetary on one of the open play tables, attracting three other players and even luring Steve Jackson himself over to ask about the scenario.

We were playing Nova, where the Eastern and Western blocs try to stop aliens from orbiting the sun to detonate a nova bomb. Although the alien players were at first worried about the distance they had to cover, we all quickly learned that Newtonian mechanics made it hard to catch the invaders.

I was playing the Russians (red counters), and I even managed to destroy one of the four ships. However, in the end, two ships slipped past the Americans to blow up the sun.

We also got to check out Ogre--including this huge cardboard Ogre cutout (with the game-sized version for scale).

It was the basic Mark III attacking scenario--but on a new orange map. We got to playtest the game and give our feedback to the Ogre line editor. My opponent was my gaming buddy HoldFast, who attended Saturday with me.

My command post was toast, and when we switched sides to play again, I killed my opponent's CP. It was fun playing on the new map and providing our opinions.

I talked Holdfast into buying Melee and Wizard, and we got in a game of Melee before the end of the day.

It was a quick battle, but notable in that both our fighters ended up dropping their weapons on poor rolls, and after a halfhearted grappling attempt, grabbed the ones their opponent had left on the ground.

All in all, a fun day of gaming.

Triplanetary has landed

Triplanetary is the grandaddy of all vector movement spaceship games, dating back to when Marc Miller (of Traveller fame) created it in the 1970s. I went in on the Kickstarter when Steve Jackson Games (which had acquired the rights to the game) decided to publish a new edition of Triplanetary. Well, today the game arrived: nearly a hundred counters worth of spaceships, a rulebook, and two maps representing the Solar System that cover my entire kitchen table when unfolded. I'm looking forward to trying out some of the scenarios in the rulebook and zooming around the planets according to the laws of physics.