OT?: Alien Space

Winchell Chung wrote:

> Alien Space was a marvelous game!  I recall many happy hours nailing
my
brother's spaceship with a well placed blazer beam. [...]
> Alien Space had a nice concept. For those who have never played: the
counters are 5 inches square. They show a drawing of a ship, divided
into a
nose, midsection and tail section. Around the ship is printed a 360
degree
protractor. And at the center of the ship, one attaches a six foot
length of
thread. <

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
weapon of
their very own.  One had missiles, one had tracking mines, one had
something
suspiciously like the Romulan plasma sphere, etc. <

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...
--------------------------------------------------------------
"We gotta get out into Space,	     | A sentiment echoed by:
 If it's the last thing we ever do!" |	   Phil Atcliffe  
   -- Return to the Forbidden Planet |	(p-atclif@uwe.ac.uk)