Games from the Crypt #12 - Star Fleet Tax Forms

In the last installment of Games from the Crypt, I expressed both how much I love Advanced Squad Leader and how much I actually don’t really like it all that much because it is positively dinosaurian in its approach to rules. Granted, those rules support a tremendous degree of simulation and detailed narrative that flies in the face of many overly abstracted games that, in the immortal words of the great designer Richard Launius, “may as well be about filling ketchup bottles.” In an era where “cozy” designs with three rules and a bunch of rebuses make for a compelling 10 minute gaming experience and flavor text is mistaken for theme and setting, ASL stands as a monument to how rules proscribe and define story and how when interacting with player agency they can create pocket universes that we can live in for a couple of hours.

All of that put me in mind of another game that, when I was hanging out in game shops and cons in the 80s and 90s, was just as intimidating as ASL was. Another game where you’d see mostly middle-aged gentlemen sitting around pouring over big binders of rules or filling out what appeared to be tax forms, brows furrowed and chins stroked thoughtfully. But this game wasn’t played on the colorful, pastoral geomorphic hex maps depicting bocage or the beaches of Iwo Jima. The maps were usually pitch black – the void of space – dotted with either counters depicting starships or for the upscale crowd, miniatures of starships.

1979’s Star Fleet Battles, designed by Stephen Cole, was published rather ironically as a “pocket game” under a weird licensing arrangement whereby the publisher (Task Force Games) could depict the vessels of Star Trek but nothing specific like named characters or storylines. Mr. Cole and envisioned the game, correctly in the eyes of this Trekker, as a kind of naval battle game with specific details adjusted for space combat such as shields, torpedoes, phasers, Romulans, Klingons, and so forth. Much of the game’s content was based on the fabled Star Fleet Technical Manual, probably one of the most famous works of fan fiction of all time, and although it’s not actually canonical the game offers more “milsim” level detail of Star Trek’s ships and combat than anything else out there.

Unlike ASL, which took me about 20 years to get around to, I actually had a copy of this game in the early 80s because I liked Star Trek. But I was like 8 or 9 years old and a lot of it evoked a very “do what now” response even though I was already playing games like Ogre and Car Wars at an early age. Sometime in the mid 1990s, a friend and I tried to play it and we both sort of dismissed it as boring – there simply was too much paperwork involved in filling out ship records, tracking power levels and shields, and working through turns segmented into “impulses” which quite cleverly simulated ships and other physical bodies moving at different speeds through the void.

By that time, like ASL, Star Fleet Battles had mountains of expansion content with a terrifying amount of rules for all kinds of ship types, weapon systems, orders of battle, and all kinds of minutiae. It was very much a lifestyle game, and even in the 1990s that lifestyle was really quite niche but still the game trundled on, and I mostly looked on it with wonder and admiration from a distance.

It wasn’t until about 20 years ago that my friend Billy, who also played ASL with me, brought up the idea of trying Star Fleet Battles. Amarillo Design Bureau, who had taken on the publishing rights, had just put out a supposedly “streamlined” edition better tooled for modern audiences called Federation Commander. We took the dive, and just like with ASL I found that I loved the detail and narrative but the sheer bulk of it was still overwhelming. And the whole tax form angle was a few steps up from BattleTech’s mech record sheets, which again had me thinking please for the love of Spock someone make this a video game.

In play, the game is quite compelling. The submarine-style battle in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan is basically exactly what this game is all about. Cat-and-mouse maneuvering to get into firing solutions. Detailed systems damage. Power management balancing shields versus weapons, propulsion, and other ship functions. Tracking torpedoes as they inch across the board. And then there’s boarding actions, ship command factors, and doing all of the above with multiple vessels involved. It is not a fast-paced game. You will pew-pew your way through this one, captain.

I didn’t think that Federation Commander was all that much less complicated than “full” Star Fleet Battles but as a somewhat more accessible design I appreciated that it was playable and engaging if you really, really, wanted to get into the fine details of Star Trek space combat. Like Star Fleet Battles, expansion upon expansion emerged for it as a separate product line, but over the years I found myself without a way to play it regularly. Billy moved away, and even though there were some limited options to play online, actually finding someone to play with that really, really wanted to get into the fine details of Star Trek space combat was basically impossible. And Kahless bless Amarillo Design Bureau; they are still keeping this game going with POD, PDFs, and continued releases even to this day. These days, a copy of Federation Commander will set you back a cool $150- about twice what we paid 20 years ago. But possibly worth it if you are going to commit to it!

Interestingly, unlike ASL which generated an entire cottage industry of games like itself but more playable, more modern, more approachable – the same didn’t really happen with Star Fleet Battles. The influence of Star Fleet Battles seems to have trickled down almost third-hand such that the games that followed really haven’t done the same things it did. There was the abominably mathematical Attack Vector: Tactical years ago that introduced 3D vector movement and meticulously un-romantic and un-exciting realism, but at the cost of a somehow even more complicated set of rules. Games Workshop’s Battlefleet Gothic might be considered something of an heir, but it also had its own take on “boats in space” combat. A great take, mind you, but it still wasn’t the same and you couldn’t play it with counters. GMT had a really interesting system that was indeed very much indebted to Star Fleet Battles called Talon that replaced the tax forms representing your ships with dry erase hex markers. It came across as somewhat soulless, however, and even though I had hoped that it would take off on Boardgamearena.com it never really did.

And then there was X-Wing, which was hugely successful but was more about fighter combat despite some capital ships in the mix, and it was more a direct copy of Wings of War than Star Fleet Battles. Yet ironically, the one game that comes closest to my mind to getting us back to good ol’ SFB wasn’t even the Attack Wing Star Trek game based on the X-Wing system. Fantasy Flight’s Star Wars: Armada to my mind seemed to capture much more of the allure of SFB, with big-ship combat , fighter actions, power management, and boat-like movement. Yet, it was Star Wars, not Star Trek. Somewhere a Trekker just shed a tear.

So here we are in 2026 and still, no game has really gotten me back to the feeling of playing even the scaled down Federation Commander version. Which stinks, because it’s a game that very much deserves to be modernized, and designers today would do well to look at how intricate and detailed the game was. Surely someone out there has come up with a garage digital implementation, right? Of course there have been some great real-time space battle games (like the recent Battlestar Galactica: Deadlock - again, not Trek) but I want the stodgy, submarine-like spaceships and the feeling that it's mean in that big ol' captain's chair commanding one of those magnificent Star Fleet ships -preferably either the Defiant or the Enterprise-D, but I'll settle for a Bird of Prey.