Starship Adventures
“Absurdist romp aboard a spaceship full of quirky characters, written by a team of ChoiceScript superstars” might be my new favorite bizarrely specific IF genre. Last year, Stewart Baker got together with a bunch of pals, most of them Nebula nominees, to write A Death in Hyperspace, which won this year’s Nebula Award for Game Writing. But nearly a decade before that, Felicity Banks got together with a bunch of pals, most of them up-and-coming Hosted Games authors, to create Starship Adventures. Banks organized the project and wrote three chapters; Adrao and Eric Moser contributed two chapters each; Doctor and Jacic each wrote a chapter; and they all worked together to contrive a coherent plot and unified tone and to make decisions about game design. I’ve worked on betas with Banks and Adrao. I’m a huge fan of Moser’s games, and I’ve enjoyed some of Jacic’s short pieces - but somehow I’d never got around to giving Starship Adventures a try. This week, I rectified that.
Starship Adventures is a brilliant satire of old-timey science fiction tropes. You’re the captain, a daring leader with perfectly styled hair. Your crew consists of a gruff mostly-alien engineer, a surprisingly effectual damsel in distress science officer, an android with a penchant for saving the day in deus ex machina fashion, and some guy named Joe. You travel among worlds populated with brightly colored alien races, dangerous plants, and sentient machines, getting into episodic scrapes that are always neatly resolved by the end of the chapter - but could there be a more sinister plan afoot?
It’s a short and silly game, but it’s worth playing a few times even if you don’t die in the last chapter (which I did), just to explore the outcomes of all the different options, which range from relatively reasonable (attack your enemy with a flamethrower!) to downright ridiculous (attack your enemy with a mop!). If you like Spaceballs or Galaxy Quest or Monty Python, you’ll definitely find a few chuckles here.
Worthy of note is the Special Features section. Casual players may wish to take advantage of the opportunity to modify their stats, while those who are interested in game design will enjoy the commentary, editorial notes, and excerpts from discussions on development issues.
Starship Adventures is sadly underrated, and deserves far more attention than it gets. If you’re in the mood for something funny, or you’re a fan of any of the authors involved, it’s definitely worth a try.