A bit of a depature for this week's Auction of the Week. Not a straightforward RPG or supplement, but rather a boardgame that has elements similar to that of a role-playing game: West End Game's 1985 Star Trek: The Adventure Game (link to eBay search).
STTAG was designed by adventure gaming luminary Greg Costikyan (SPI's The Creature That Ate Sheboygan and WEG's Paranoia and Star Wars Roleplaying Game) and is an obvious labor of love from a classic Star Trek fan. Like WEG's Tales of the Arabian Nights or the Choose Your Own Adventure series of books, STTAG is a paragraph-system boardgame: players refer to a book with 800+ numbered paragraphs, each which describes a situation that ends with options that lead the players to a new paragraph with the results. 120 different adventures are possible, and 2 players compete as either the UFP or Klingon Empire (solo games are also possible).
As I said, it's a boardgame and not an RPG. But I think most Trek roleplayers would find it a lot of fun for a change of pace, and see some familiar elements. For instance, characters have varying skills such as Command, Science, Navigation, Seduction, Charisma and so on, making some characters a better choice to resolve a conflict than other.
The game includes a short rulebook, the paragraph book, a mounted map depicting the space between Earth and the Klingon homeworld, counters for characters, starships, planets and other markers and dice, all inside a very nice game box with a lovely cover by Boris Vallejo (originally a painting for the Trek novel "Black Fire" by Sonni Cooper). Despite the TMP style of the box, the contents and the game itself are decidedly TOS. You can find more information on the game along with pictures at its BoardGameGeek entry.
And a much better use of that cover than on the sad little novel on which it first appeared (a novel that required an Idiot Plot of such proportions that I could feel brain cells being sucked out of my skull as I read it back in high school...).
ReplyDeleteI have to say that it was around this time that I stopped reading Trek novels for years. I found that I simply couldn't finish any of them, and I don't think I picked up another until Peter David's "Vendetta".
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