Designer's Comments

Operational megagame based on the eponymous book by Heinlein.

Based on the eponymous novel by Robert Heinlein. The players split between the troopers and the allies. In the first half of the game the troopers got to enjoy themselves shooting up a fairly defenceless alien planet. In the second, the alien players were now the rather more fearsome bugs and took their revenge. An intriguing stage of the design came when we analysed the deployment described in the book and realised two things: that a battalion was deployed across an area approximately the size of Scotland and that troopers were deadly either at about 5km when they fired off a mini-nuke or close up. But between that they had no effective weapon. It certainly posed an interesting tactical problem for the trooper players. The bug movements were kept hidden from the troopers to give the feeling of ‘they could be anywhere’. A rare venture into SF for me, odd given I’ve read SF since I was very young and possibly played one of the first SF figure based wargamers.