Tuesday, December 28, 2021

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?

1 comment:

pancerni said...

Interesting. Too many projects here, will follow your progress, if you share.