Interstellar War

Interstellar War

Designer: Kenneth Johnson
Type: Wargame
Status: Free
Available from: http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Starship/5857/iw.html

From the author:

'Interstellar War is a complete game though improving even years later. My friends and I always wanted there to be a science fiction strategic war game set in a universe that the players themselves could define, rather than be forced into a setting. Federation and Empire, Star Fleet Battles, Starfire, Imperial Starfire, Warp One, & Stellar Conquest -- they were all inspirational boardgames. But I always found something that I wanted more of in one or the other. Sometimes I wanted more ease of play, sometimes a little more flexibility, sometimes more strategy.

'That started my quest to develop my own game to share, eventually what we called Interstellar War. Starships, the heart of what I wanted the military strategy to be about, would be defined not by full sheets of data or tremendous strings of characters but by 8 characteristics. And these characteristics could be abbreviated to one letter each with their values represented by numbers. Instantly you could have a starship with X weapons, Y speed, Z amount of armor/shields, and so forth. And the exact look or style of these starships and the underlying technology could be left to the imagination of the players.'

All that you need to play is six-sided dice, some hexmaps (available on the website), some counters for starships, pencils and then printouts from the website. Games can be as long or as short as you wish, but a good game can go for over 6 hours.