There’s a starShip waiting in the sky…

I think I’d like to teach it, but I’m afraid I’ll blow your mind.

Now that that blasphemy is over.

Let’s talk Interstellar.  There’s a number of ways to get started with the game, which is the first barrier to actually playing the thing.  One of the ways is actually finishing a game of High Frontier and exiting the board using one of the actual exits:

Or finish using one of the Futures that specifically refer to leaving the solar system (which usually involve exiting the map anyway):

Pictures on cards are less blurry than they appear.

BUT, we won’t be starting that way.  That would involve playing a whole other game (which will take several hours) and will result in a rather hap-hazard starship, since I’ll be limited to what I could throw together in a CEO solitaire game.  So we can flip open our rulebooks to the Quickstart rules (Quick, HA!) and see we have 2 options.  We can either take an actual Starship, which is a metallic thing with an engine and cockpit and all Star Trekky, OR we can use a Beehive, which is a hollowed out Asteroid which has either been flung on its course, or has a small engine on it.  The game is VASTLY different depending on which you choose.  The scale is even different, with a crew card representing 12 people in a Starship and 10,000 in a Beehive.  I kind of want to show both, since they both create interesting challenges, but I think I’ll do a Starship since that’s what people are more comfortable with.

So, first we start by choosing which government/faction put together this mission.  It could be a

•  – Libertarian Work Ethic
•  – Left Wing Commune
•  – Right Wing Family Values
•  – Centrist (Robot Emancipators)
• or Authoritarians

I’m going to say this started out as a military exercise, so we’ll start Authoritarian.  Don’t worry, the ship will be in space for a long time and a rigid military structure will probably break down…or not, who knows?

It prevents me from talking to other ships (only useful in multi-player games…which this game is NOT, really…but I suppose it can happen), and helps me defend against Mutiny and any scientific accidents that may go wrong.  It also makes it easier for me to study Neurology, which is a good way to fight off stress.  I also get the Red crew card as the first members of our, um, crew. They’re old (60 years), but they brought this plan to fruition, so we bring them along anyway.

So we start with our “Market,” which is going to look very familiar with those of you who have played High Frontier before:

The difference is most cards are starting on their upgraded side.  Much more fun that way.  Not to mention, you don’t want to travel to Alpha Centauri with stuff we could build in 2010.

The upper-right corner we don’t need to worry about as that’s our Beehive choices.  Pfft.  Who needs a Amat-initiated H-B Magnetic-intertial thruster?  It only uses 9 nano-second pulses of a hundred billion anti-protons at the Hydrogen and Boron in a 50mm pebble to cause it to burn and produce 140 giga-joules of kinetic energy.  Yeah, every 2 seconds that would make 83kiloNewtons of thrust…and .4%c exit velocity.  But who wants THAT?

BTW, the idea for the Magnetic-inertial thruster?  The paper was written in 2003.  WHY AREN’T WE BUILDING THIS STUFF?

Ahem.

So let’s get our cash for our Mission.  We start with a measly 16WT.  I’m sure the scale is larger for this, but it doesn’t seem like much.  I suppose I could raise it to make the game easier, but we’re going according to Hoyle here, so 16 it is.  Before we spend all this money, we get to search the nearby stars for planets.  If there’s no habitable planets in the area, nobody would start this silly mission to begin with.  Makes sense to me.  So we make some Exoplanet Search rolls until we find one.

Of course, we start with Alpha Centauri:

All we do is a simple 2d6 roll.  Looking under Alpha Centauri we see if we roll a 7, we’ll find a fuel rock that can give us fuel for D, M and V class rockets.  If we roll a 3-6, we’ll find a habitable planet as well as that fuel rock.  On snake-eyes there will also be a Living Planet which is habitable and gives you double Victory Points at the end of the game.

Yeah, I don’t worry about Victory Points.  I just want to get humans there.  So we roll and we get 5!  Good roll!  So we have a habitable planet there.  Now I can continue to scan the skies for more planets, but at the cost of 1 WT each.  The government isn’t made of money, ya know.

I’m sure you’ve noticed Proxima Centauri and the skull and crossbones on it.  Yeah.  That.  Before we make it to our new planet, we’ll have to see if Proxima is actively flaring.  If it is, we can’t go there.  Or we die.  If it isn’t (on a roll of 2-6), then we’re fine.  I could spend the 1WT now to see if it is or not, but let’s make our ship first and see if we have any money left over.  I can scan the star on the first turn and then start scanning other stars as I move along.  Not the best plan, but the cheap one.

So now we use our WTs to get cards.  1 WT gets you a card off the top of a deck OR you can move some cards to the bottom of decks with 1 WT, which I HATE doing.

Here’s what I generally go with:

• Mass 0 Robonauts are a must.  They are a free throw-away card to get you factory cubes and all sorts of other things in game.
• Scientists are important.  Make sure to have a few.  Get low mass people, though.  Short people are good in space.
• I’m thinking using less Bernals are better since you don’t need that many humans Active, but I could be persuaded otherwise.
• Extra radiators aren’t a bad thing, especially 0 mass.  You can always discard them for other effects.

So the Thruster on the top of the deck is the Magnetic Mirror Beam Rider.  The fun thing about this, you don’t need to bring any fuel with you, you’re flying on a laser beam shot from Sol.  The BAD thing is stopping.  You have to figure out another way to stop.  There are many, but they are difficult.  For instance, the colonists on the top of the stack, the Juiced Cosmonauts, have one way to brake: Drogue braking.  That’s skimming the Starship over a gas giant.  Ouch.  Considering Alpha Centauri has no gas giants, that’s not an option.

But hey, it’s a challenge, right?  So let’s light this candle and go with the Beam Rider.

If that astronaut’s to scale, I hope we’ve built a few more things onto the ship….

Speaking of which, I’ll grab a Bernal now.  Which Bernal you end up with doesn’t matter.  There’s no Faction privilege or anything, all the Bernal pretty much represents is the hull of the ship.  So it’s Mass counts, and it also counts as a limit to how many humans can be alert at once.  You can keep 1 colonist awake + 2 per each Bernal you have.  So if I only grab 1 Bernal, that’s 3 awake humans, so I’ll have to rely on Robots for everything else.  Yet another limitation, but one I’m willing to work with to make my ship smaller.

As an amazing bit, the Beam Rider doesn’t need any Radiators or anything AND it has its own Generator, which can power the electro-magnetic “shielding” that is used to keep dust from puncturing the Starship and killing everyone aboard.  That being the case, most of my mass is going to be humans and robots.  So let’s see what we have.

 

The Quantum Cascade Laser will need a radiator attached to the ship, which stinks and it is used in order to scan planets at a distance.  Or I can just grab it as mass and discard it later for something useful (just using it as an idea in our 3D printer), which I think might be better.  The Juiced Cosmonauts are engineers, which are important, they are also politically aligned with the current regime, which will prevent any mutinies.  They can also do some space walking to repair shields and radiators and do some crazy brake maneuvers.  A bit heavy, though.  And finally the smart pets can do the space walking and fix the EM shields and they weigh nothing.

If they weigh nothing, they are going into my hand, no contest.  I’m going to grab the Cosmonauts and Laser as well.  I may discard them later, but they seem okay for now.

I’m ankle deep in Engineers.  The Robonaut is mass zero, so that goes into my hand without thinking (and it doesn’t need support).

I grab the others because having some badges are good, and robots are worthwhile  So I’m 8 WT deep in already. I do this until I end up with quite an extensive hand.  Cards in my Starship Stack are on their Black sides except Colonists and Crew, which are on their white sides.  Bernals are on their Promoted sides to show that their shields are working.  We also put in our Thruster on the Promoted side, because otherwise we’d have a short-ass game.

Sadly, looking at the cards I ended up with, I’ve got way too many heavy colonists.  I leave the Siren Programmers back on Earth, and end up with a Mass of 28.  Just like High Frontier, we put that Mass on the Fuel Strip:

We round down on the strip, which is why I didn’t want to go over 30.  You CAN shed mass as you fly, but it’s a pain in the tookas, so why not get just as close to it as possible so I’ll be able to brake other ways.  Also good considering I don’t need to bring any fuel.

And now one of the hardest choices of the game:  Exiting the solar system.  There are 3 ways to do it, with pluses and minuses:

Exit by Neptune, which has you starting the game at a dead stop.  Not too bad because being parked at Sol allows you to interact with Earth for an extra turn BUT it takes a long time to build up speed and the faster you get to where you’re going, the less chance you’ll DIE on the way there.

You can exit by the Oort cloud, but you have to make a radiation roll (if you roll higher than the Rad-Hardness of the card, it gets killed.  Fun) and do an Event turn before you get started.  It represents the long hard trek out there.

OR you can spin around the sun and Jupiter and really fling your way out there.  That gets you going the fastest, BUT you have to roll 3 dice and take the HIGHEST as your radiation roll.  However, it doesn’t affect humans in “The Vats” (more on that later) AND I have a robot that provides +1 rad-hardness to all co-located cards.

I’m going back and forth between Neptune and Jupiter.

What do you think, guys?

Neptune has a good point, water is essential to human life.  Jupiter, on the other hand, tried to kill me.  So I’m going to go big and scary and try to slingshot myself around Jupiter and the Sun (twice!) and fling myself at a crazy exit velocity.

Because why not?  And I don’t want to get hit with a lightning bolt.

Because of the radiation hazard, I’m going to change my crew a bit.  I’m dumping most of the humans into the Vats (basically suspended animation) and I’m going to disassemble my ‘bots.  They won’t get fried if they haven’t been built yet.  Of course, that means I’ll be spending the first turns waking people up and building robots, but we’ll see how that goes.  It’s honestly a strategy I’ve never done before.

So here’s what my layout looks like (The Age Track):

On the left at Age 1 is an upgraded Bernal which represents my ship’s hull with working EM shields.  If it goes unpromoted, the shields aren’t working.  If it gets discarded that means we’re pretty much open to interstellar radiation.  And that’s bad.  At Age 2 are my pile of colonists and their “Profession Disc.”  In a physical copy of the game, you’re just using all the various discs that come with the game.  Here they are much more fancy.  Blue means that Colonist (or those colonists, since it represents 15 people or so) are chilling in the Vats.  The White disc on the Microgravity Panthropists means they will be acting as Scientists on this journey. They could also act as Biotechnicians (see the little leaf under the Scientist marker?) or even Spacewalkers (The buggy icon under the leaf), but having Scientists available is good.  They are also Rad 5, which is 6 with the Halbonauts, so they are safe from radiation from my crazy slingshot maneuver.

At Age 3 are the before-mentioned Babbage Halbonauts, acting as Engineers.  They could also act as Spacewalkers.  Finally is the crew card way over at Age 6, grumbling in their Vats.  I could give two career discs to my awake humans (or even the robots), but as you’ll see, working a lot makes you more prone to…well….dying.  So let’s not do that, shall we?

So let’s fly around Jupiter a couple times!  My results are 1,1,6.  Which would be a rad hit of 6, which would have shut down ALL of my robots and most of my humans.  Luckily I shut everything down during those slingshot maneuvers.  The good news is that because I chose the Jupiter maneuver, I can put my speed on the fastest starting point available:

You’re still only moving 1/2 space per turn, but it’s not hard to get going at 1 a turn (or 4% the speed of light!). Then you can start going crazy speeds after that.  But one thing at a time.  Let’s just get outselves settled for our journey to Alpha Centauri.

It is only 8 spaces to Proxima Centauri, so I have to make sure I know whether I can actually go there or not by then.  If I know by the time I hit space #2, I can turn to the right and head toward the lower half of the board towards those stars.  If not, space 5 lets me hit the left branch and head towards the top half of the board.

There’s quite a few places to go, actually, but let’s just worry about the first 8.  So let us now officially start turn 1.

 

Yeah, that’s right, I’m 2500 words into this, and I haven’t actually started the game yet.  I mean, sure, I still had to make a ton of decisions setting up my Starship, so you could definitely call that part of the game, but the official turn structure starts now.

Or maybe they start tomorrow.

How’s that for leaving on a cliffhanger?

If you enjoy this post and want to buy me a coffee, go and visit ko-fi.com/cthulhukid.  If not, that’s okay too.  Thanks for reading.  See you in 4,730,365,236,290,400 meters.

 

Now off the cliff.