Kreador Freeaxe wrote:The game was around back in the 80s. I think when Next Generation started, Paramount may have had the game killed off for copyright infringement. Not sure.
Not so much.
SFB never infringed copyright, because they got a license to make their games from Paramount.
However, their license only included the original series and the animated series, not TNG or DS9 or Voyager - so they couldn't include "new" elements like Cardassians, Ferengi, Borg, etc (or, obviously, new style ships). That was fine, because SFB had already and added new races (such as the Lyrans and Hydrans) and made existing minor races more important (such as the Tholians, Gorn, Orion, and Andromedans, each featured in one episode apiece, and the Kzinti which featured in one animated series episode written by Larry Niven, who probably later regretted allowing his IP into the Trek universe) and extrapolated into the future of Trek (with the Andromedan invasion and X-series technical improvements) in ways that were incompatible with the "real future" provided by TNG.
The license continued, however, and they republished everything in the later 90s with a brand new version fixing many of the rules issues in the first two versions. There was even a video game series based on the SFB universe rather than off the "real" Trek universe called "Starfleet Command". Even today, the creators have SFB have adapted to the internet age by making their products print-on-demand rather than boxed up in game stores.
Older versions were known for being more like "Star Fleet Rules Lawyering" than Star Fleet Battles, but those days are long gone. The later rules revisions are much tighter and have fewer bugs. Game play is long and complicated, but rewarding in my opinion.
The strengths of the game are attention to detail, heavily cross-referenced rules and such a huge variety of options that you can play for years and never explore everything. The weaknesses are tooooo many rules, the designers being obsessed with the naval metaphors which sometimes fly in the face of science fiction, and their super-strict license observance getting far too much in the way of fan contributions. As both a strength and a weakness, I'd mention that the tournament rules are a very, very restricted subset of the full rules - which is good because you can get a grip on tournaments and decide if they are fair, but also makes you wonder what the rest of the game is "for" - I mean not everyone plays to practice for tournament, but that just makes it harder to find fellow players because you also have to take into account whether they're the kind that play by tournament rules exclusively for practice or don't care.
and I play an awful lot of casual games from sites like Big Fish. But who or what is a gamer, if it's not someone who has played the games named above?
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