Voyage of the B.S.M. Pandora, subtitled "Adventures on Unknown Worlds", is a solitaire science fiction board game published by Simulations Publications, Inc. (SPI) in 1981.
Voyage of the B.S.M. Pandora, subtitled "Adventures on Unknown Worlds", is a solitaire science fiction board game published by Simulations Publications, Inc. (SPI) in 1981.
Voyage of the B.S.M. Pandora, the prequel to the previously published SPI game Wreck of the B.S.M. Pandora (1980), is a solitaire game about a distant future space ship on a biological survey mission to a fixed number of unsurveyed planets. [1] The player searches for and collects alien life forms, trying to minimize losses of crew, equipment and robots, while maximizing the number of life forms collected.
The B.S.M. Pandora has a crew of seven, each with different skills, as well as four robots with different capabilities and several pieces of specialized equipment. When the ship reaches a planet, the player reads the planet's description from a list of 232 different paragraphs. With limited room in the space shuttle and only one round trip to the surface allowed, the player must decide which crew members, robots and equipment will shuttle down to the planet's surface in search of collectible life forms.
In the May 1980 edition of Ares (Issue 2), SPI published a science fiction game, Wreck of the B.S.M. Pandora, in which 1–6 players try to repair a downed spacecraft before they are killed by environmental factors or escaped aliens that had been collected before the crash.
Four issues later, in the January 1981 edition (Issue 6), SPI published a prequel game, Voyage of the B.S.M. Pandora, to explain how the ship had collected the aliens before it crashed. The game was designed by John H. Butterfield and Edward J. Woods, and featured art by Butterfield and Redmond A. Simonsen.
Milo B. Shiff reviewed Voyage of the B.S.M. Pandora in The Space Gamer No. 38. [1] Shiff commented that "Overall, I would recommend this game to anyone who enjoys science fiction literature and has an itching to be a character in the book. The game is an excellent compromise between a novel and a role-playing game." [1]
The Polish game review site Tanuki Czytelnia provided a retrospective review in 2010, and found the rules to be complex "and needed to be read several times." However, once the rules were mastered, the game was judged to be "brilliant" and "addictive". With over 230 possible planets, "the plot always took a different turn" in various games. Tanuki Czytelnia concluded that for players looking to take a break from computer games, Pandora still had the ability "to provide a lot of entertainment." [2]
The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction cited the game as "the most influential early example" in the context of development of solitaire board games [3] and "perhaps the first successful example of a single-player, paragraph-system board game". [4]
Traveller is a science fiction role-playing game first published in 1977 by Game Designers' Workshop. Marc Miller designed Traveller with help from Frank Chadwick, John Harshman, and Loren Wiseman. Editions were published for GURPS, d20, and other role-playing game systems. From its origin and in the currently published systems, the game relied upon six-sided dice for random elements. Traveller has been featured in a few novels and at least two video games.
Cosmic Encounter is a science fiction–themed strategy board game designed by "Future Pastimes" and originally published by Eon Games in 1977. In it, each player takes the role of a particular alien species, each with a unique power to bend or break one of the rules of the game, trying to establish control over the universe. The game was inducted into the Academy of Adventure Gaming Arts & Design Adventure Gaming Hall of Fame in 1997.
Robinsonade is a literary genre of fiction wherein the protagonist is suddenly separated from civilization, usually by being shipwrecked or marooned on a secluded and uninhabited island, and must improvise the means of their survival from the limited resources at hand. The genre takes its name from the 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe. The success of this novel spawned so many imitations that its name was used to define a genre, which is sometimes described simply as a "desert island story" or a "castaway narrative".
Invasion: America, subtitled "Death Throes of the Superpower", is a near-future board wargame published by SPI in 1976 that simulates a hypothetical coordinated attack on North America by various factions.
Redmond Aksel Simonsen was an American graphic artist and game designer best known for his work at the board wargame company Simulations Publications, Inc. (SPI) in the 1970s and early 1980s. Simonsen was considered an innovator in game information graphics, and is credited with creating the term "game designer".
Deathmaze is a fantasy board game published by Simulations Publications (SPI) in January 1980 that falls into the general category of dungeon crawls, more specifically, dungeon games in which players enter a dungeon, massacre the dungeon dwellers and steal their treasures.
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Universe: The Role-Playing Game of the Future is a science fiction role-playing game published by Simulation Publications, Inc (SPI) from 1981 to 1983. It was praised for its innovative and tightly organized rules for such sci-fi RPG concerns as generating planets, applying character skills to in-game situations, and resolving the initial moments of alien encounters; however, it was also criticized for its cumbersome encounter/combat system and its lack of compelling background material. Universe was also noted for its "striking" Interstellar Display, a poster-sized, astronomically accurate map of all stars within 30 light-years of Earth.
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Demons is a board game published by Simulations Publications (SPI) in 1979 in which players control magicians who conjure demons to aid them during a treasure hunt.
Freedom in the Galaxy, subtitled "The Star Rebellions, 5764 AD", is a space opera board game published by Simulations Publications, Inc. (SPI) in 1979.
Time Tripper is a science fiction board game published by Simulations Publications, Inc. (SPI) in 1980.
The Wreck of the B.S.M. Pandora is a science fiction board game published by Simulations Publications, Inc. (SPI) in 1980.
John Carter: Warlord of Mars is a two-player board game published by Simulations Publications, Inc. (SPI) in 1979 that is based on the Barsoom novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs featuring the hero John Carter.
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Operation Olympic: The Invasion of Japan 1 November 1945 is a solitaire board wargame published by Simulations Publications, Inc. (SPI) in 1974 that simulates the planned American invasion of Kyūshū, one of Japan's Home Islands, in November 1945. Although critics complimented the game, it did not prove popular, perhaps because it was a solitaire wargame.