Unboxing: Triplanetary

So, in general, I'm a fan of Steve Jackson Games.  I love sci fi games and space-based combat.  And of course I'm a Kickstarter junkie.

Triplanetary checked all three of these boxes, so I was in!  Triplanetary is a game that was first released in 1973, and last reprinted in 1981.  Through Kickstarter, SJG brought this title back to life, which I think is pretty cool.

This was a low stress campaign with zero additional stretch goals or other shenanigans.  Pledge. Wait. Get game.  Simple simple.

Anyway, here's the grand unboxing.

The game box - Front.

The game box - Back.

Box top open.  Oooooh, I love that smell.  The instruction booklet is nicely printed and illustrated but is thinner than "modern" sprawling epics like Gloomhaven or KDM. 

The game board comes in two pieces. At first I thought these were to separate mission maps but they actually join together.

Game board laid out with the game box for scale.

Most of the box is actually empty space.  There's the game board and a single sheet of punch-out tokens - no minis, meeples, or standees (although it's probably begging for some 'borrowed' ships from X-wing or Armada).  There are a pair of dry erase markers to record ship movement (the manual provides a method of shorthand to encode past moves).  And a single d6.  ... that's pretty much it!  

I'm actually impressed that the game was reprinted intact - the temptation to pimp out the box and "Kickstarterize" the reprint with minis, addons, and stretch goals.  But I think they made the right call and kept the price down.

The neat part about the game is going to be the vector-based movement and fuel management.  Simple, elegant rules where ships maintain their inertia between turns and fuel points are spent to change direction - sort of like Classic Asteroids on the old Atari 2600.

Will be fun to hotseat a game on a rainy Saturday soon.