Tacship

Cool old school artwork!

My trawl through the dusty, cobwebbed corners of my hard drive in search of simple, 'beer and pretzels' games continues! This time I unearthed a copy of Jon Tuffley's simple tactical level space fighter miniatures rules, Tacship, as published in Ragnarok Issue 3, now long out of print but available for free via the SSFFW website.

Here's a handy link:

http://www.sfsfw.org/a/03/tacship.php

How these ended up pasted into a WORD document on my hard drive is anyone's guess. I can't remember when I added them to my sci-fi collection but I must have done at some point. Anyway, they are what look to be a very straightforward but fun set of rules, with a definite emphasis on fast play and a lack of complicated book keeping, fancy turn sequences or complex mechanisms.

In fact they appear to be the perfect 'tea and a wad', space dogfighting rules with plenty of scope for designing and arming your own fighter space craft including all the whistles and bells, from pulse lasers to missiles and mines. There would be nothing to stop you adding additional type of ordnance if you wanted to or even tweaking your space fighter with extra technological add-ons, as the rules are simple enough to be adapted and extended should you wish to do so.

Groovy 70's retro typeface!

I really like the look of these rules, which have a neat thrust and velocity based movement system and can be played with hexes or without, adding another layer of flexibility. I'm thinking of using them with the old Silent Death plastic space fighters that you can now buy from EM-4 for peanuts, so this could be a very cheap and cheerful project indeed.

I'm pretty sure that I've already got a couple of boxes of these in the loft somewhere...just have to find out exactly where???