Presents...

The Starship! Story
A short tale of the development of a
miniatures game

With the re-release of Starship!, we thought that a story of its development, the stumbling blocks encountered, and how everything was eventually resolved, would be interesting to some of you, particularly those of you who have had an interest in Starship! over the last few years.

By now, many of you are thinking, "Wait.  Hasn't Starship been out for several years now?"

Well, if you are thinking that - or something like it - you are totally correct.

Starship! was originally released before its time.  Not in terms of the rules being done; they were in development for over five years and we are happy with the final product.  The system overall was not ready because we could not viably produce the figures and support the game in a meaningful manner.  We are a (very) small company, and our Pirates! line is usually our number-one priority.

Starship! was originally developed by Brad Carlson.  Anyone who knows Brad will readily admit that he's a person of greater-than-average intelligence.  We all have friends or know someone like Brad.  A very quick thinker that always seems to be at least one seat ahead of you on the thought process train, or perhaps on an entirely different train that left hours previously.   Mathematical solutions (aka 'number crunching') spring into his head virtually unbidden.  As a gamer, he's the kind of guy that you don't enjoy playing against very much, but whom you respect for his mastery of the rules.  I can personally state that if you are ever going to seriously design games, you want someone like Brad in your court.

I think anyone who reads through Starship! will see these qualities come though in the game's design.  While Thomas and I did contribute to the game, Starship! is definitely Brad's baby.  It is mathematically intense in its design, but not in its playing.  The options are legion, but not overwhelming.  It is a game design balancing act the likes of which I have not seen before, and it is all the more impressive because it works, and play is not complicated in spite of the design theory behind it being so.  I would personally never design a game like this, not because I don't want to, but because I'm incapable of pulling it off, and I have written a *lot* of wargaming rules!

Getting Starship! to press was a herculean task.  The play testers at the Chico Game Club played so much Starship! in the last year of it's development that many of them are claiming psychological trauma as a result (they played twice a week almost every week - enough to burn anyone out on anything.)  We did make our publishing deadline, and when we released it at Conquest back in August of 2000 we not only had rules, we also had the new Battlepole design and some miniatures for two fleets available in small numbers - the DARC and the S'Tang.  Brad sculpted the DARC.  They were his first production sculpting project of which I am aware.  The S'Tang were sculpted by a friend of Thomas', Steven Tang.

After the initially heady rush of getting a new game out on the market, we started to run into snags.  Brad, who was in charge of casting (at that time, Brad did casting and orders, Thomas did sculpting and painting, and I did all the writing/typing and web page design), found that he could no longer handle that in any meaningful manner.  Supply of all our products slowed to a trickle, and, when he moved out of California it looked like we might have to shut down for good.

Flagship Games was without any means of production for almost six months, and that after a very dry spell indeed.  Getting new models out for Starship! or any of our other ranges became an impossibility as we scoured the Country for a new caster.  Thanks to Tom Dye at Minifigs, we finally hooked up with Dan Levy at Vac-U-Cast Plastics.  Dan has been a true blessing to us.  Without him, Flagship Games would not be able to do anything but write wargaming rules and be rowdy at conventions.

It took about a year from that point to get our Pirates! line back up and running to the point where we pretty much always have a good level of stock on hand.  Once that problem was resolved, we turned our attention back to Starship!  The DARC fleet was discontinued for the time being as the originals were too rough and not truly up the quality we like.  The S'Tang were re-mastered so that they now have a higher level of detail and consistency of production.  And Thomas commissioned Steven Tang to sculpt a new fleet - The EMC.  The EMC are the ships you see on the cover of the Starship! rule book.

Things were looking very good come August of 2004, and we were all ready to "re-release" Starship! to the wargaming public.  That's when yours truly, in his post-convention delirium, threw out the turret and fin masters for the EMC ships - Doh!  It was the bone headed move of the year for sure.  Fortunately, the masters are being re-poured and will be off to the metal casters within two weeks, and we should have plenty in stock within three weeks of that date.

So, four years a couple of months after its release, Starship! is finally ready for the wargaming public.  It has been a powerful learning experience for us.  Most of the games I have written have not been dependent on us producing figures/models for them.  I just write the rules, Thomas provides his input and we go to press - easy.  Making a game with complimentary figures and models, however, is a much greater challenge in terms of financial outlay, production coordination, administration, etc.  Hopefully, we'll do a better job next time.

And that's the story of Starship!  Hopefully all the difficult times are behind us, and we can look forward to new support materials and models for this exciting space combat game!

Any design project begins with sketches.  Here are some of the original sketches for the S'Tang and EMC fleets.

Original sketches for the EMC fleet.

Below are some preliminary sketches of ships of the dreaded alien S'Tang race.  Just click on the thumbnails for a larger view!
 
 

S'Tang Size 1	S'Tang Size 2	S'Tang Size 3	S'Tang Size 4	S'Tang Size 5

All our Starship! models are made of resin, metal, or a mix of the two materials, depending on the size and casting needs of the model.  This will enable us to keep the cost down on the larger size ships, as they are made predominantly of resin.

An EMC SS4 ship - unpainted.

One of the concepts we are using on the EMC ships is allowing some customization in appearance.  We do this by including various fins, weapon and F/M bays.  In the photo above you can see the fins outlined in blue, the weapon bays in red and the F/M bay in green.  There are no hard and fast rules of where you put these extra bits.  They do not have any impact on game play, but instead serve as an easy tool to allow you to customize your ships so that they do not all look alike within the same fleet.  We are looking at ways to accomplish the same thing with the S'Tang ships, and with future fleets as well.  We will be offering these bits separately too.