3/22/2023 0 Comments Play race into space![]() ![]() There’s no better boardgame or videogame to indulge your inner astronaut. For all its faults, including the sometimes impenetrable manual and the confusing board, the game has captured my imagination. It also adds space colonist “Bernal” space stations, freighters, and rules for an endgame project similar to a wonder victory in Civilization. It takes the map all the way to the edge of the solar system. The latest expansion is called Colonization. High Frontier has been constantly expanding since its release. Eventually, you’ll explore and industrialize space. When your refinery successfully enters Mars’ atmosphere and avoids the dust storms to meet up with the robonaut miners you’ve sent three years before, you’ll feel the joy of an entire mission control in the throes of celebration. If you do stick with it and learn the rules of the simulation, the payoff is great. Not to mention that the initial frustration of learning the game can be devastating. A solar flare or hazardous approach can destroy an expedition you’d spent a great deal of effort on. You’ll get extra prestige for some space ventures. ![]() Every site you claim and every factory you build earns victory points. Since High Frontier is a game, there are victory points to collect. After I establish an extraterrestrial factory on one of these sites I’m building even more advanced designs to explore the outer solar system. I’m sending a high powered beam drill to the asteroid belt. I’m braving the dust storms of Mars to land a rover. Every mad curve on the board is a deliberate simplification of orbital mechanics, every blueprint on a card is an idea someone put forth in earnest. As I read through the rulebook, I rediscover the wonder and fascination I had with space exploration. High Frontier is beautiful and magnificent. The rules are organized like a technical manual, the cards are detailed blueprints, and the map of the Solar System has lines all over it like someone designed it with a Spirograph. I grow up, triple A games become shooters and I never find anything like Race Into Space again.Ībout twenty years after that first hike through the desert I find a little boardgame called High Frontier. I could play out an entire saga of spaceflight from little sub orbital hops to the goal of landing a man on the moon. A famous astronaut lends his name and you have the magnificent Buzz Aldrin’s Race Into Space. A boardgame called Liftoff had been picked up and converted into a PC game. Shortly afterward, space boardgaming would call again. Which labs do I build? Are there enough Solar Panels? Which scientist to send up and what projects do I start? Where do you go after you achieve orbit? My adolescent imagination lit up.Īfter the jump, one small step for a twelve-year-old We’re on a scouting trip and I spend a good chunk of the long trek interrogating a fellow scout about a game called Project Space Station. I’m twelve years old hiking through the desert east of San Diego.
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