Introduction to the The Final Frontier replay – Colonising the solar frontier

Introduction

This blog is to replay the boardgame The Final Frontier: Man’s Expansion into the Solar System with modified movement rules. I will be running it in a spreadsheet and PowerPoint and aim to play a turn a week or two.  It will be with 4 powers and all done solo.

Background

I have been looking for a game to satisfy my itch for solar system colonisation for 20 years.  I have dabbled with using Godsfire (too complex), Sword in the Stars variations, Rocket Flight and a few of my own (don’t ask, they were all bad.).  Recently I was relooking at my variation on Sword and the Stars and came across an HTML file I had found in 2002 that was an early draft of the rules for “The Final Frontier”.  I was aware of it in swirling in the back of my mind but seemed to remember it was too complex.  It isn’t so I bought the game as I was determined to use it.  It is what I was looking for, mostly.  The mostly was because I have been enamoured with the Rocket Flight Delta-V map and wanted to use something similar for the game.  All I did was create a condensed Delta-V map of the solar system and then used the Final Frontier rules, almost entirely unchanged.

The replay “To the Stars!” on boardgamegeek is an absolutely fantastic replay – 60 turns of goodness. And boardgamegeek also has this review.

Rules and Map changes

The map is a condensed Delta-V map that is about 6-12km/s per square.  I guessed at most of it.  The rules are The Final Frontier except:

• Movement is always 1.  Can go past the asteroids at NIL 2 and past Saturn at NIL 4.
• Asteroids do not slow movement.
• There is one asteroid – Ceres – with resource level 2 that can have colonies. It has no water so requires two investments to be operational but with these special rules: A mine only require one investment and the Ceres Mine produces 1d6 as per asteroids.  This makes investing in asteroids an earlier option as you could colonise Ceres and use it as a base to produces mines for the other asteroids.
• Movement between Jupiter’s moons and Saturn’s moons is not “free” and requires a DST for moving.
• Each turn is 1 year.

Other notes

This is the fourth game I have played facilitated by the spreadsheet.  Game 1 I cannot remember why I stopped when I did.  Game 2 I stopped when I got distracted by other things and by the time I got back to it I could not remember enough about the game to continue 😊 Game 3 was 25 turns and even got in a bit of combat but got distracted again.

I am also thinking of tracking escalating tension levels between the powers so if it reaches a certain level they may attack, or at least build defensive units.  e.g. if one power builds on Mars and then a second power does, increase tension.  If the second colony becomes larger, increase tension further. 

Next post will be the setup.