Starfire (board wargame)
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Starfire is a board wargame (a "4X," eXplore, eXpand, eXploit and eXterminate) simulating space warfare and empire building in the 23rd century, created by Stephen V. Cole in 1976.
There are five editions of the Starfire Game. The first edition consisted of three products: Starfire (1976), Starfire II (1980), and Starfire III: Empires (1980); the first two by Stephen V Cole, the last one by the notable military science fiction writer David Weber. Later versions combined the first two into Tactical Starfire, and the third was largely rewritten as Strategic Starfire.
Tactical Starfire is a game of sublight space combat on the small-fleet scale. Speed of play is often touted as an advantage of the system; it does have a major advantage in fleet handling over Star Fleet Battles, but there are many other games around of similar handling time to Starfire.
Tactical Starfire is based on the original version of Starfire, and on its sequel Starfire II (renamed Strikefighter for the 2nd edition). The 2nd edition product line continued with New Empires, the first strategic-level game in the series, and The Gorm-Khanate War.
Strategic Starfire is a game of building a space empire, inspired by the original Starfire III. Players must decide what to invest their income in (colonization, R&D, trade, military, exploration, etc.) to determine both the nature of their empires and their ability to survive and conquer.
The game is currently published by the Starfire Design Studio (SDS), but was formerly published by Task Force Games.
Between 1990 and 2002, David Weber and Steve White co-authored a tetralogy of science fiction novels set in the game universe: Insurrection, Crusade, In Death Ground, and The Shiva Option. The Shiva Option made the New York Times bestseller list. A follow-up novel, Exodus, co-written by Steve White and Shirley Meier, is to be released in December 2006.
Besides these professionally written novels, numerous Web sites contain fan fiction written by Starfire players.
