Task Force Games

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Task Force Games was a game company started in 1979 by Allen Eldridge and Stephen Cole. Mr. Cole left the company in the early 80's, but continued to design the company's best selling Star Fleet Battles game. Mr. Eldridge sold the company to New World Computing in 1988. The company went through an additional change of ownership and is currently out of business.

The Star Fleet Battles series of games is currently published by the original designers, Amarillo Design Bureau Inc.

TFG published many games, including the Starfire series of games which were later novelized by David Weber into such books as In Death Ground, The Shiva Option and Insurrection. They also published historical games such as Battlewagon and History of the Second World War.

Task Force Games also published a series of Pocket Games, their version of microgames.^[1] Several of these microgames were later expanded and released as board games. TFG microgames include:

Valkenburg Castle
Starfire
Asteroid Zero-four
Cerberus
Star Fleet Battles and later Expansion #1, Expansion #2, Expansion #3
Prochorovka: Armor at Kursk (later released as the board game Armor at Kursk)
Intruder
Operation Pegasus
Starfire II
Spellbinder
Robots!
Battlewagon
Survival
Ultrawarrior
Star III Empires
Moon Base Clavius
The Warriors of Batak
Boarding Party
Escape from Altassar
City States of Arklyrell
Checkpoint Omega

Many of the games were considered cutting edge for their time.^{[citation needed]} One distinct feature that many of them had was that unlike many wargames of that era, players often had a degree of customization over their armies--For instance, in the Starfire series, a player could design every component of his starships, and in Robots! A player could build his individual robots from a modular design, making tradeoffs in price and functionality between different movement and weapons systems.