Pyramid Review
Battlestations Supplement #1: Galactic Civil War
Published by Gorilla Games
Written by Jeff Siadek
Cover by A.D. Hamilton with Patrick Morgan & Mario Zavala
Illustrated by A.D. Hamilton
96-page b&w softcovers & 30 double-sided full-color fighter/mine markers; $24.95
It's war!!
Actually it is civil war, and on a galactic scale. As hinted at in the end of Battlestations, the sci-fi board game from Gorilla Games that combined frantic roleplaying and personal action with ship-to-ship combat, trouble is brewing in the Universal Republic. Not that war is unknown within the Universal Republic, but in an age when cheap cloning means that lives are disposable, such conflicts tend to be petty and last only until one side decides that it can no longer afford to replace both lost clones and lost ships.
This war is not petty. The very future of the Universal Republic is at stake. Best described as a benign dictatorship, it is happy to monitor these small wars, all while imposing a sizable tax burden that funds the massive fleets of the U.R.E.F. -- or Universal Republic Expeditionary Force -- that are tasked to prevent them from escalating. Of course, the Universal Republic has its detractors and dissenters, but their protests are to no avail. So what happens when a whole race objects?
The Whistlers are a newly discovered species, balls of feathery appendages capable of "puffing" across open spaces, who were readily and happily admitted to the Universal . . .
This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.
Article publication date: September 7, 2007
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