From: Ross Hagglund Subject: Re: "Web and Starship" > From: Dave Kohr > Date: Fri, 18 Apr 1997 00:08:17 -0500 > Subject: "Web and Starship" (was Re: H G Wells SciFi/Fantasy Game award) > > On a tangentially similar topic, how is this game "Web and Starship'? Dave, I haven't played this game since it first came out so my facts may be a bit "rusty". W&S is a three player game (one of the best three player games I've ever played). One player is a race of "moles" (moles in that they move by sublight from one planet to the next, once they reach a planet they create a "tunnel" to link the planet into their network). The second player is a "flyer" (meaning this race is all FTL jump ships which operates like your classic space opera fleet). The third player is the human, the human has a little of both technologies and attempts to steal/research whichever he finds more appealing. The three races fight over a cluster of star systems which have variable value to each race. The goal is to be the first to conquer enough points worth of planets (and hold them?) before anyone else does. Alliances are often shifting with the primary focus being the mole vs flyer, until the human becomes a threat (and then things become wide open). You have an array of ships, ground troops, planetary defenses from which to spend your economic points on purchasing. The reason this won the HG Wells award is probably due to the effective use of plausible future technologies in such a fashion as to make a well balanced game. I believe the only reason I've not played the game in some time is that the owner moved away (and I only recently acquired my own copy). If you have any other questions I could dig up my copy and provide correct information (i.e. not from memory) Ross (ross@informix.com) ------------------------------ From: Neal Sofge Date: Fri, 18 Apr 1997 10:03:25 -0700 Subject: Re: "Web and Starship" (was Re: H G Wells SciFi/Fantasy Game award) >On a tangentially similar topic, how is this game "Web and Starship'? The >catalog describes it as "hard" SciFi It's hard all right. I never did play it because I didn't want to deal with the 3-D movement involved. The map is of the local group, and stars are coded as to their Z-axis coordinate. The game comes with a rangestick, which you use to find the lateral distance between two stars, then you look up the true range on a chart that figures out the Pythagorean Theorem for you and rounds the distance to the nearest integral value. Which is about as easy as 3-D strategic movement can be, but still too irritating for me. But the map is beautiful, and accurate as far as I could tell (my only other reference being the map from Traveller 2300) and the game's concept is a rare attempt to get 3-player mechanics to work without using the old 2-on-1 trick. If I hadn't lost it to moving frenzy, I'd probably try it one of these days.