by Byron S, 24 October 2024
Let there be no doubt the influence that Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope released in 1977 had on the board gaming community. Within three years, the industry had responded with a number of titles that focused on close action combat aboard starships, space stations, and cantinas. Among them are greats like Snapshot, Asteroid, Adventurer, and Azhanti High Lightning. And then there is Space Warrior.
Overview.
Argon Games, Raleigh, North Carolina, 1980
Designer: Robert J. McCredie, Stephen G. Walburn
Graphic Design: Robert J. McCredie
Space Warrior is a game of man-to-man combat aboard a space craft. No scale is provided, but each counter represents a single Space Warrior, so the map hexes are probably somewhere between 3 to 6 feet as a character can move 5 hexes per turn and no stacking is allowed. The game supports two player and multi-player scenarios, and the number of characters each player can controls is “left to the discretion of the players”. Our gaming group used teams of three, but more characters per player seems reasonable.
Game components:
Included within the convenient zip lock bag is a rules sheet, an 11 x 17 hex map of a ship interior. The map is remarkably similar to the one found in Tom Wham’s classic game The Awful Green Things from Outer Space, so one may reasonably assume it was built in the same shipyard. The counter sheet features identically drawn top-down “white versus black” space warriors in what appears to be either the “compressed high ready” or “air Marshall ready” position. I am unsure this was due to poor artistic effort…or whether it is prescient of the training that emerged post 9/11 for close quarters combat about flight craft. I am going to go with the former. Also included are character sheet and playing charts. Not included but necessary for play are two six-sided dice per player.
click images to enlarge
Rules and Gameplay:
The rules are presented on a 6 page tri-fold pamphlet format. Gameplay begins with character construction, where each player has four points to spend on building a character with four attributes: wounds (hit points), offensive class (to hit bonus), armor (damage protection), and weapons (damage bonus). In our gaming group, most character builds and teams consisted of a damage tank, a sniper, and balanced fighter. Stats are recorded on character sheets along with the figure counter number.
After building the teams, players role dice to determine who defends and attacks the space ship. Attackers secretly write down one of three landing zones they will deploy their team. Defenders place their characters anywhere except the three landing zones. Once all the defending characters are placed, the attacker reveals their landing zone, place characters and battle is joined.
Turns are IGOUGO with initiative determined via dice roll. Each turn, a player can spend 5 Movement Points per character to move (1 MP), shoot (2 MP) or reload a weapon (2 MP for a pistol; 3 for a rifle). Important note: according to the Terrain Effect Chart, movement through walls is not permitted. Which is weird, but hey, science fiction, right? Combat is unnecessarily complicated, as hits are determined via a weapon range matrix and 1d6 dice roll CRT. One would have thought that a single dice roll plus or minus modifiers would have been adequate, but it looks like the designer wanted something more “realistic”. Possible results were Dead, Hit, and Miss, where a hit 1D6 damage from a pistol, an 1D6+2 for a rifle. Attributes – such as armor and offensive class – modified dice rolls.
Optional rules included suggestions for a campaign play / persistent characters, and for written movement.
Overall impressions:
Despite the amateur graphics and the brevity of the rule book, Space Warrior turned out to be a fun game that served as a reasonable primer to more “complicated” close action combat games mentioned above. Our gaming group were big fans of Melee by Metagaming Concepts which featured only two character stats (strength and dexterity), so there was room for more experimentation with team composition. Having said that, the game featured only two weapons – laser pistol and laser rifle – so a plethora of home-brew weapons were obviously called for. Before long, we had stats for stun grenades, light swords and daggers, and laser shotguns (Don’t judge. We were also playing lots of TSR’s Boot Hill at the time).
The simple map provided lots of tactical options. One thing we liked about Space Warrior was that your characters builds were quick, and you could take a number of hits before getting killed. Compare this vis-à-vis to our other favorite “shooter” games like Boot Hill and Top Secret, where the complicated process of rolling up new characters was pretty much de rigueur for every game session (no walking away from a shot to the chest from a buffalo rifle). On the other hand, we also decided that Star Warrior was little more than a game of Melee played with only ranged weapons, so it was perhaps inevitable that the game lasted only a couple of months on our gaming table.
I recently found my copy of Space Warrior tucked away inside my boxed copy of FGU’s Skull and Crossbones pirate RPG. For a moment, I had a whimsical notion that it might be fun to host a game at my local annual gaming convention. Just for nostalgia. After finding (courtesy of BGG) that fewer than 15 people claim to own the game, I realized that perhaps some memories should be allowed to rest where they lay.
Like in deep space.
Where no one can hear you roll dice.
Part 1, Beat to Quarters, is here
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