Games From the Basement - Star Trek: The Adventure Game
Yes, Star Trek: The Adventure Game. This gem was put out by West End Games. The best art was the cover, but it uses Star Trek: The Movie (or one of the movies) for the uniforms. The back cover shows a shot from Star Trek: The Original Series (with Kirk wearing a green shirt, which wasn't that common. or was it?)
Anyhow, I picked this up for a few reasons back in the day.
First, this sucker was Star Trek. Star Trek rocked, and was always more my kind of Sci-Fi than Star Wars ever was (not saying Star Wars was bad - it was pretty awesome, but Star Trek is the Sci-Fi I wanted to live).
Second, although it says it's for 2 players, it also prominently stats on the back of the box that it's suitable for solo play. As a role-player, I never had trouble getting a group together, but getting together for 1 on 1 play was rare to non existent. What few war games I had I rarely had someone to play with. A game that billed itself playable by one player sounded awesome.
Alas, few things work out as well as planned, and this was one of them. The rules were fairly intricate - this was not a sit down and play game, but a sit down, grab a drink and start studying these damn rules. Fairly heavy rules for something that had a whole book of solo adventure type paragraphs. Study I did. Look at the box. Look at the counters. Everything was punched out. I tried, I really tried. But a s a solo game this sucked. It was boring. It was hard to get invested in it. The counters were less exciting to look at than those of the war games I wasn't playing.
I still think of this game from time to time. Wondering if it was me. Was I somehow defective and not the game? Would it have played better as a two player game (probably, but than again, probably not enough better to justify the experience)?
Ah well, this one is definitely destined to go to storage. Interesting more as a curiosity to me and little more. It's a shame, really.
But hey, here's Spock for your Hobbit enjoyment ;)
Star Wars is science FANTASY, so we're talking apples and oranges here. That's why I never got the whole Star Wars versus Star Trek thing. Maybe the fact that they both have the word "Star" in their titles, I guess. But they are different subgenres, people! Give all the arguing a rest! ;-)
The cover art is actually reused - it was originally used for the cover of the Star Trek novel Black Fire, by Sonni Cooper. I'm not surprised they reused it - it's a great piece of art
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Re Kirk's green shirt: I think the costume William Shatner wore was green in real life, but the studio lights made it look yellow.
ReplyDeleteinteresting. those damn lights
ReplyDeleteStar Wars is science FANTASY, so we're talking apples and oranges here. That's why I never got the whole Star Wars versus Star Trek thing. Maybe the fact that they both have the word "Star" in their titles, I guess. But they are different subgenres, people! Give all the arguing a rest! ;-)
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteThe cover art is actually reused - it was originally used for the cover of the Star Trek novel Black Fire, by Sonni Cooper. I'm not surprised they reused it - it's a great piece of art
ReplyDelete