I forgot a favorite. It’s maybe a controversial favorite, because it eschews complexity. I played a game over zoom back in the spring though, and had a blast with it.
It’s a space game called Starfire. It’s from Task Force Games.
The game itself was deceptively simple. Spaceship combat on a hexagonal grid in space.
What really made it special was the personalized ship design, combat, and damage systems. Which were an absurdly easy, yet awesome design thing.
Every ship design in the game could be written out as a series of letters in a line. G stood for guns. M for missile launcher. A for armor. S for shields, I for Ion engines. Simple. For every Ion engine in your ship, you got one movement point. You’d indicate that in parentheses after your ship build.
So a little escort ship with one shield, two armor, two guins, a missile launcher and five engines might look like this on your piece of paper (Escort hulls can only hold ten “things”):
SAAIGIMGII (5).
If you got hit for 1 damage, you’d mark off the S. Shields are down.
If you got hit for two more damage, you’d mark off the two armor spots. You might keep taking damage in a big fight. You could lose an engine, or your weapons, etc.
The great thing was the fun of designing your own ships. a 5 movement point escort is speedy. Maybe you want one that’s more heavily armored though, and less fast. Or one with more guns. Or maybe you don’t care if you lose your escorts, so instead of putting the ion engines at the end, you put your guns and missile launcher at the end.
And then you get to things like freighters with holds, tractor beams, ECM, etc. The simplicity of everything lent itself beautifully to designing big fleet battles with massive dreadnaughts and frigates and carriers with fighters.
I dunno. Maybe it’s too much bookkeeping for today. But I can tell you that many a study hall was spent designing frigates and escort corvettes and suchlike according to these very simple parameters. (Typically game – you get $500 space bucks to build a fleet, I get $500 space bucks to build a fleet. Then we match 'em up and fight it out.)