These notes were originally published with Starship Command II, but they apply to Starship Command as well.

Designers' Notes

Starship Command came about through the desire to find a fast-paced ship combat game that was fun. We had played Battleline's (now Avalon Hill's) Naval War forever and had found it quite enjoyable. But we wanted more. When 3W released Modern Naval Battles we jumped on it immediately and played several times before we decided it was a disappointment. The chrome was great, but the action die determined all too often who won the game, and it dragged on seemingly forever. Michael Russell decided he could do better and Starship Command was born. Starship combat had yet to be covered in a card game (that we knew of at the time), so he chose to make it the central focus of the system.

Starship Command went through over two years of fanatical development and playtesting. The rules were written and rewritten several times before we were finished, and the game has held up incredibly well since its initial release in February 1992. The four of us who designed Starship Command had over 40 years combined gaming experience. The oldest of us was then 26 . . . .

The first edition was a disaster as far as production was concerned. If a book is ever published on how not to produce a game, we will no doubt be the primary case study. Never, ever think that a commercial game of this size can be produced for under $10,000 and done right. We tried to do it for under $2,000 and wound up with a physical disaster of the first magnitude as far as the cards were concerned. Friends became ex-friends and we moved on.

Still, what few reviews we got were incredibly positive. Scott Haring's The Gamer, never one to mince words, gave us a B+ despite the atrocious physical quality. Vortextwas equally positive. Sadly, neither of these two publications is around any more.

We barely broke even on the first batch. While we've been told that this was a bloody miracle as far first games go, it was enough to kill us off for a while — we had to make money and we couldn't with what the printer had left us.

People who played the game liked it enough that despite only selling about 150 copies of the first edition, we had enough interest generated to keep up a tournament at the Strategicon game conventions in Los Angeles. Fortunately enough for us, this group included one individual willing to invest in the company, Nick Cortinas. He approached Russell about it, not the other way around. We were flabbergasted. Not wanting to stare too long into the proverbial horse's mouth, we immediately got together the second edition just in time for Origins '94.

Several cosmetic changes were made for the second edition. The most important was the ship cards were completely redesigned and the ship art computer generated. The rules were revised for clarity and readability and the cover art was redone. The card backs were redesigned, although we tried to get the stylized logo to print out and couldn't do it at any of the graphics places we tried. Several ships were renamed and few were modified.

This time we did it right. Cortinas is also a manager in a print shop, so he was invaluable in getting the production done right. The results speak for themselves. Still, this print run was only 1,250 copies. By the time you read this, the next print run of the original game should be just about done.

Originally Russell hoped to use FASA's adaptation of the Star Trek™ universe as the setting for his game. When it became apparent this would be impossible, he developed a whole new galaxy to set his game in. Michael Fryer designed the Packtons to finish out the four races included in the original set.

As we playtested, the final set of features coalesced and we spent the last year before the release of the first edition getting those features to work to perfection. We put on the back burner all the neat ideas we came up with, intending to use them later. That later is now.

When we did the original Starship Command we had two design axioms we stuck to: Keep It Simple and No Dice (as in no dice are required to play this game, period). In this expansion we did pretty well in keeping with the first one and easily kept the second one. This required two complete rewrites of the rules and over 40 revisions. Rules development is not pretty.

With this expansion the game gets a bit bloodier, so we fiddled around with Plasma deflectors, Photon deflectors, and double deflectors. This added too many cards for too little results, so we junked them and introduced the Generic Deflectors (which had been used briefly during the playtesting of the original design). We didn't even have to add or change any cards. Of course, deflectors work fine just stopping phasers, but if you feel things are a bit too bloody with the new cards then by all means use this rule.

Carriers and fighters are a staple of science fiction shoot-em-up-in-space flicks. We *HAD* to add these. It wasn't easy, but we're pleased with the results.

Ranks were designed originally with the assault ship rules in mind, but found again to be too much effort for too little effect. However, when we came up with carriers, ranks made possible a myriad of strategies that weren't available otherwise without them, so we stuck them back in as a standard rule. This proved to annoy several playtesters who felt the game lost the "beer and pretzels" feel it had before. We finally compromised and made it an optional rule.

We had a lot of complaints about that we didn't have enough Reinforcement cards in the original game. We added four more here, but we also added a counter; Communication Interception.

Gremlins are our version of Murphy's Law in space.

Tactical Advantage was added to speed the game up and keep people from abusing the fact that the deck was about to run out. Now you can never be sure when the battle is going to end.

The Dawgoraks and the Fostonians were designed by Eric M. Aldrich I and Steven Seacord, respectively.

We hope you enjoy this expansion. We put a lot of work into it. Hopefully you will feel it paid off.

And if you think it looks easy, YOU try thinking up the names of 24 different types of wild cats.

Thanks again,

Eric, Mike, and Steve