Pyramid Pick
Starfleet Command
Designed by 14 east
Published by Interplay Productions
$44.99
System requirements: Pentium 200mhz (or faster without 3D acceleration), Pentium 166mhz (or faster with 3D acceleration), Windows 95/98/NT, DirectX 6.0, 32Mb RAM, 250Mb HD space, 4x CD-ROM.Starfleet Command (SFC), Interplay's new Star Trek real-time strategy simulator, delivers just what many Trek fans, myself included, have dreamt of for many years -- a computerized version of Amarillo Design Bureau's Star Fleet Battles (SFB). For those of you not familiar with Star Fleet Battles,. you may be surprised by many of the game's elements. First off there are no Borg, Cardassians or Ferengi due not only to licensing concerns, but also the fact that Star Fleet Battles, and hence, Starfleet Command, is set in a different era with its own timeline and history, which doesn't quite match recent Trek history.
The reasons behind this major difference essentially boil down to the fact that SFB was licensed in the '70s, before the series of movies and the three new Star Trek television series were created. SFB's license has never included any ships, characters or races created since the original series, and SFC is no different. Within their narrow license, Amarillo Design Bureau (and the previous publisher, Task Force Games) has built a rich and diverse board game pitting strange and unique races against each other, races which have not been included in the new era TV series. SFB aficionados will be . . .
This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.
Article publication date: November 12, 1999
Copyright © 1999 by Steve Jackson Games. All rights reserved. Pyramid subscribers are permitted to read this article online, or download it and print out a single hardcopy for personal use. Copying this text to any other online system or BBS, or making more than one hardcopy, is strictly prohibited. So please don't. And if you encounter copies of this article elsewhere on the web, please report it to webmaster@sjgames.com.