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Sounds like an easy game to design, but it was definitely the hardest. And it took fifteen freaking years from inception to when it should land on tables in the middle of 2012.
Let's set our wayback machine, shall we?
Into the Fire
"Wow. I want to play that!"
I didn't actually speak those words or even speak anything out loud, but I can firmly fix a date and time: February 6, 1997, at about 9:00 PM EST. The climax of the Shadow War story arc in Babylon 5 is pretty much the center of the entire series. It was also a CGI-heavy episode with several massive space fleets, ships flying every which direction, and a frenzy of laser fire that was too complex to actually follow.
Having grown up with spaceship battles that mostly consisted of:
[Closeup on bad model]
"Fire forward guns!"
[Shot of laser fire in space with no ships in frame]
[Shot of ship model with small firework and a hint of smoke curling upward]
"We got em!"
Sigh. That episode of Babylon 5 made me happy. So being the rabid game acquirer I am, I started buying and surveying lots and lots of board and minis games involving spaceships. (This is not an entirely uncommon type of obsession for me, and so now I have 3,500 games.)
As to the other spaceship games, there are a lot of really nice ones around, but not a lot that allow you to have lots and lots of ships. A group playing a Babylon 5 battle with perhaps twenty ships took something like six hours. Even faster games like Silent Death and Full Thrust tend to run a couple of hours with a dozen or more ships. Having designed a few games, I figured I could work out something better.
Signs and Portents
One of the weird things about Battle Beyond Space is that I am quite consciously aware of the origin of even the tiniest aspects of the game. Reader be warned: there is name-dropping ahead.
It wasn't really just one episode of Babylon 5 that got me obsessed on star fighters. When I was young, I was fascinated by World War I biplanes and dogfighting. I owned a copy of Ace of Aces: Handy Rotary that I could play practically perfectly, especially once I worked out that all of the movements are defined by a hex grid. I built models of planes and such, and plane models were common gifts. I always liked the fact that in the basic Ace of Aces game you hit something when you pointed at it. It was simple and easily understandable.
One early bit sticks out dramatically. Dad took me to see a movie called Midway, mostly because a local theater was showing it in Sensurround. Afterwards, we nipped in to a department store where I saw a copy of a game called Carrier Strike!, which I've always been pretty sure is a Mike Gray design. It is a pretty amazing and clever game that almost holds up today.
Keep some things in mind here: Each player gets two carriers and 12 planes. On a turn, you can fly some planes via a D6 roll or move a carrier. The one flaw in the game is that it is impractical to bother moving a carrier. It takes so many turns to move a carrier to get out of the way of a torpedo that you will be swamped by the other player. Our standard house rule was that you always got to move planes AND one carrier per turn.
When you read through or play Battle Beyond Space, you'll definitely see some parallels with Carrier Strike. Some of the other bits make the game a very different bat indeed.
Of course growing up in the late 1970s and 1980s meant that I got the great post-Star Wars wave of movies about spaceships blowing up. Some of you had probably worked out that James Cameron got his start in a Roger Corman movie called Battle Beyond the Stars. But during this time period, we got things like The Last Starfighter, Starcrash, Megaforce, and the other two Star Wars movies. There was also Battlestar Galactica, which was basically an entire show about an aircraft carrier in space. We also got Buck Rogers for no explicable reason except to show that Earth always has the best pilots. (It *IS* there in Battle Beyond Space. Earther powers are all centered around the fighters, and "Earther" definitely sounds like something from a cheesy script.)
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There is a key idea from the movies that is the first created idea for Battle Beyond Space. There is always, ALWAYS a super-secret weapon that is unleashed at the last minute which totally saves the day. Bonus points if the young pilot is warned "never to use that". And yes, the first power created for the game was Death Blossom.
(As an aside, I should note that for years, the automated train system underneath Hartsfield Airport in Atlanta had an announcement system that was a total dead ringer for the Cylons in Battlestar Galactica. They even included a pretty harsh announcement and a bit of laser fire to warn off people blocking the doors. Sadly, it is now a pleasing multilingual announcement that is less jarring to most people...and yet another tiny bit of awesome leaks its way out of the world. Heavy sigh.)
Objects in Motion
Us 40-somethings also got to grow up with video games. This is from the golden era when pretty much every third video game was a shmup with you shooting at something from a spaceship. A couple of my particular favorites were:
Tac-Scan: This was a remarkably innovative vector graphic game in its day. The biggest twist is that you were given a pool of ships for your quarter. These could be slotted into spots in a frame at the bottom of the screen. Your own little mini fleet turned and fired as one unit, but each ship would take its own hits. The same idea turns up in Galaga, and the awesome Xbox Indie game Shoot 1Up. The idea for grouping the fighters into squadrons came straight from this gem.
Space Zap: The development title for Battle Beyond Space was "Space Zap". The game is pretty forgettable, except as a possible source of many early RSI injuries for folks my age.
Star Control II: This didn't show up until the 1990s, but it is the greatest video game ever made about ship combat. Combat itself is an enhanced version of Computer Space/Space Wars with two ships and a bit of gravity. The ship powers are the star here, as each ship is remarkably unique with powers and unique play style to match. Star Control II provided a library of ideas for ship powers to mine. (I'm still trying to work out a power that heals your ship if you call out "Idiot, Jerk, Moron, Fool" to taunt your opponents, just like the Pkunk.)
Points of Departure
Ah. I was writing about a game. What I did about my space game was...
Nothing.
All of my game design time went into Warhamster Rally, Dia de los Muertos, Arcana Arcanissima, and a couple of failed designs. (I'd also list Nodwick, but that was the shortest design I ever did. It worked from practically the first playtest.)
The problem with all of those other space games is that they tried to simulate every single ship in movement all at the same time. Movies don't do that. What was needed was something that gets the dramatic flow of something happening. Then it has to end and give someone else a chance to play before they get bored.
And it all has to resolve at lightning speed.
Richard Borg solved the first problem in his "Commands & Colors" system. The system not only strongly focuses what you can do on a turn by dividing the board into three regions, but it also places a strong focus on what you can do. But because my spaceships should be everywhere that wasn't going to work. Dividing my ships into three squadrons and letting you pick between them did the same thing, so you had a hand of cards, and playing the card chose its squadron and its action. (Hints of Battle Masters here as well.)
Making the squadrons fly in formation (like Tac-Scan) also really reigned in the number of choices. Bonus points for adding an Ace of Aces-like hit system which said that when you aimed at something, you hit it.
Add some rules to let ships pile into and out of Battlesta...Capital Ships. Add some more rules to vary the two races so that one had shields that required two simultaneous hits but had far fewer ships. Build a quick prototype out of a standard hex grid, some old ships from the Buck Rogers game, and some popsicle sticks broken in half. (I needed something to represent capital ships, and these had to be two hexes long.)
This was all about 2000-2001. That version went through quite a few variants, all based on the Chessex hex grid map and popsicle sticks. All of them really sucked to actually play. The problems were legion and began a series of chained issues I needed to resolve:
1. The first one was fixed easily. A kind of freeform "move the group this many hexes" became a very strict list of moves for a squadron: Move X, Fire Y, Turn up to Z hex sides. This sounds simple, but it is the absolute key to making this game work. It also took forever to get that exact sequence.
There are some interesting implications. Because you don't get to turn until after you fire, you can see the threatened area in front of each ship pretty clearly. Also, the actual choices involved are which of the three squadrons to move and how to face the entire squadron. That's it. The move and fire are just resolution. (Later versions allow each ship in the squadron to turn separately. That allows squadrons to branch off, which does seem more correct and allows for just enough extra control.)
2. Oops. The Move-Fire-Turn means that a LOT of ships end up crashing into each other. New rule: Ships fly through everything as long as they don't end up in the same space. Space is 3D, and ships are always zipping by each other in the movies. That also means we can add asteroids to break up shots, and the rules allow you to add lots of asteroids.
3. Double Oops. The rules for getting into and out of carriers are complex to explain. It isn't any worse than Carrier Strike.
4. Um. The ship powers and shields are also complex to explain. Trying to get ships to line up on a target is now pretty impossible thanks to the Move-Fire-Turn.
5. Grrr. Two-player actually doesn't work at all. Player 1 moves into range. Player 2 shoots his ships. Player 1 moves another squadron into range. Player 2 shoots his ships.
6. Screw this. Toss the cards and popsicle sticks. It'll never work.
Revelations
So the game went on the shelf for awhile (assuming, of course, that the shelf was at the bottom of a landfill somewhere). Then in 2003, a new game sparked my interest – Mission Command: Sea. Turns out Craig Van Ness basically reworked Carrier Strike. The end result is a rather different game, but with a lot of the same feel and some clever ideas of its own. I like it, but can practically never get two-player games to the table, even the little 30-minute ones.
That started me thinking about Space Zap.
1. Adding more players could fix the whole two-player death lock by adding enough chaos. So maybe it could work as a 3-4 player game.
2. Mission Command: Sea works and actually has a game with REALLY simple rules. If I ripped out a bunch of the chrome, started all of the ships on the map and stuck with a basic one-hit-one-kill model, the game might work.
So I dug out the old hex grid and scrubbed it heavily because I left dry marks on it after that last disastrous playtest caused me to shelve it. Added some nifty actual two-hex capital ships I found at Yankee Trader in Columbus. (It took a few more years before someone asked why I was using Thunderbirds as capital ships. I'm hoping no else noticed.)
And it kind of worked. For some reason, I was using a crazy endgame condition where the game ended when a player was down to four ships. Then the player with the most ships won. This wasn't terribly original, but I always liked it in Die Schlact der Dinosaurier. A guy named Andrew Greenberg (who did time with White Wolf and Holistic Designs) called it stupid and said that I should just "play ten turns and count kills".
He was right, so I started purging anything cute and clever that got in the way of the game. And the game was fun enough that I started getting people to play it.
Believers
You can buy shirts that say "Don't tell me about your D&D character"? One of the perils of having had a couple of games published is occasionally people will tell you about their games. Today, it usually isn't so bad as the Internet has provided enough information about design to raise the bar above some of the creepier ideas. I bet publishers still get their share even now.
(Seriously. One guy I met went on a 45-minute description of a card game he had invented that used a special six-suited deck. He was working with a lawyer to try to patent the six-suited deck idea. He also had a little trouble with the idea that the Victorians has six-suited decks because he had had the GREATEST IDEA EVER. So if I ever sigh and roll my eyes when asked to play a prototype, this guy is to blame. Apologies up front.)
At an Atlanta-area game store called Batty's Best, a very tiny and eager-looking person asked me if I was really a game designer and said that he had designed a game. About superheroes. I'm pretty sure I made an excuse and nipped off to the bathroom, not able to run quite fast enough. Later on, I saw him setting up a game, and (sigh) agreed to take a look.
The game was actually quite good, and it was called Heroes Incorporated. I suggested a couple of changes. He was already getting the game printed, so didn't make the changes, and began to join the regulars at Batty's Best. Turns out the guy was named Sam Clifford, who did time at EA working on various projects. He was planning on starting up a board game publishing company. Apparently in my one play of the game, I had guessed at a couple of very minor balance issues. Sam was impressed, and we formed a playtesting circle to playtest various designs.
The things that came out of our sessions were Dan Baden's The Great Chili Cookoff, a ton of small revisions to Battle Beyond Space, and the S.U.P.E.R. expansion to Heroes Incorporated. (Sam always played the Earthers because he always wanted a chance at Death Blossom.) He also wanted to publish the game and put it on the schedule after Reiner Knizia's The Adventure League.
I also trim out a turn to reduce the game from ten turns to nine, and shrink the board because too much time is spent without spaceships blowing up. The current density is that about 30% of the board is populated by ships if you cut off the corners. Odds are, you'll hit something.
I also introduce my one regret about the design. Ideally, the game should be solely about blowing up ships, which also means that scoring should only be for ships destroyed. Sadly, I see a problem where it is viable to completely avoid the middle at the start of the game, and players don't have good objectives at the end of the game when few ships are left.
The fix works well as it adds a pair of scoring options for players being in the middle at the start and end of the game. It also gives me a bit of a premise for the game in that we are fighting over the McGuffin in the center of the board. I just hate having to add a couple of rules to do so.
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Most of the work on Battle Beyond Space centered around the powers. I have still been balancing them up until we finished the final rules text in 2011. Here is the thing about powers in Battle Beyond Space: I believe in all my heart that they are reasonably balanced, but it will be INCREDIBLY hard to see it as I do. The game is a frenzied chaos of ships and power interaction. Some powers are easy to use and a little more predictable. Some powers require you to base your entire overall strategy around them to be effective. Some powers are wildly variable in their outcomes. A power might hit an absolute perfect storm where it dominates a game or cripples a player. And the same power will be nearly useless in the next game. They average out roughly, but the game is capricious and kind of dramatic – which is a nifty trick for a game without dice.
Quest Machine folded before it got to The Adventure League. Life changes caused Sam to drop the Quest Machine idea and go back to video games, and for absolutely all of the right reasons. He's working for the guys now doing the Marvel Heroes MMORPG.
The Long Dark
So here I am in 2006. I have a game that I like, but no sane company will publish. The Germans won't touch it because no one likes space games, and Germans would prefer that their game have a "real theme". (That last bit was from a German publisher who used those exact words, and he is probably entirely correct. While fantasy and S/F appeal to all us geeks, I am pretty sure that the target audience has been burned by too many bad hobby games.)
And the game is rather short and light, but has an oversized board and really wants plastic bits. (My gaming heart completely belongs to Milton Bradley.)
So I give up on Battle Beyond Space. I take it to cons, and we have a group of people that have a ritual play or two of the game at the Gathering.
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Frank Branham with Battle Beyond Space at the 2007 Gathering of Friends convention
And then there is this guy named Zev. I've actually known Zev Shlasinger for quite a few years. I met him at Origins after wondering why he has a copy of an obscure Czech game called Arena on a shelf in his booth. Turns out, he was talking to them about publishing existing English copies. Later, I harass him in a random email about this amazing game called Prophecy by the same designer, figuring he might have a contact, and give the game a chance to see a wider audience. Then I find out he is republishing one of my favorite games ever – Tales of the Arabian Nights.
So in 2008 I show him Battle Beyond Space, prefaced with "I'm not sure if it is really publishable. Good game, though." A year later, Zev offers to publish it through his Z-Man Games, but warns me that "It will take awhile". (The quest was already twelve years old in 2009. A year or two is nothing.)
The rest is production details that drag out production for awhile. Zev tries to look for existing suitable spaceship molds. There aren't any. Zev looks for someone who can do small run plastics with decent quality control. Zev also has something like 34 games in the pipeline, which is completely barking mad for a small publisher.
Then we get a ten-month delay as Filosofia and Z-Man work out the purchase and the revised game pipeline.
Meanwhile thanks to a couple of forum posts on BGG, I decide to try out two-player again. This is done under extreme duress, as I have memories of how awful the prototype was for two. Answer is, it actually does work reasonably well. The special powers haven't been balanced for two, but I haven't found anything that leads to to believe that they are completely off.
Midnight on the Firing Line
Branham at Atlanta Game Fest 20
with a jazzed-up BBS prototype
The game lasts nine turns, and you get points:
-----• 1 for a fighter,
-----• 4 for a capital ship,
-----• 1 for landing on and picking up the alien sensor probes in the center at the start, and
-----• 2 for occupying each hex around the central asteroid at the end.
On a turn you play your card. You have only one, and you've probably been staring at it for the other player's turns wishing the numbers were different. The card tells you to (always in this order):
1. Move one squadron of fighters exactly X spaces straight forward. They get to fly through anything, but there is kamikaze damage if they end up in an occupied space. [Moving one Squadron is the Tac-Scan/Commands & Colors thing.]
2. Each ship in the squadron which just moved fires five spaces straight forward, hitting the first thing in the line of fire. [Tac-Scan again]
3. Turn the fighter you just moved up to Y hexsides. [Originally Tac-Scan, but now more of a Baa Baa Black Sheep inspiration with groups peeling off of the main formation.
4. One capital ship moves, using Z action points for forward movement and 60 degree turns. [This resembles Mission Command: Sea a bit, but moving fighters and a capital ship came straight from our Carrier Strike house rule.]
5. The capital ship that moved gets to shoot at one thing close by in any direction. [Point defense turrets in Battlestar Galactica.]
6. Draw your card and sigh because it was the card you wanted this turn.
And everyone gets a secret power at the start. [The Last Starfighter, Crusade, Megaweapon, Buck Rogers/Starbuck, Babylon 5, Star Control II]
Intersections in Real Time
The game itself launches in mid-August 2012 at Gen Con. There should be a number of copies aired in for sale, as well as two copies available for demo. There is a VERY good chance I'll be standing behind one of them wearing a shirt which looks as if it was scraped off of an 1980s-era van owned by a Journey fan.
The especially surreal part is that I've been so very busy with work and moving that I've yet to start being excited/terrified/stunned that I'll be standing in front of some 30,000 people this weekend showing off something that has been a part of pretty much one-third of my life. I'm fully expecting on the drive up to Indianapolis to suffer some kind of hysterical revalatory moment. So far, my other games have been launched at different times of the year, and while I've demoed some of my games at Origins, I've never actually launched one at a con.
I also have no idea what the future for the game could hold. The coward's way out would be to just throw more elements into the game: New powers, moving asteroids, a new ship type or two. That doesn't really change the game, however – just make it more complex. So far, my ideas haven't faired so well in functional playtesting. Personally, I want to see a co-op mode with some sort of giant SHMUP boss ship with multiple guns and three attack variants that's shaped like a fish. (I've always loved the Darius games, and their quirky obsession with things shaped like fish.)
In any case, see you at Gen Con, drop by to take a look, chat about "proper" video games, esoteric movies, or the tiny handful of things we actually miss about the 1980s.
Next major article: How to jazz up your set with lava rocks.
Frank Branham
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