Task Force Games

Task Force Games was a game company started in 1979 by Allen Eldridge and Stephen Cole. Mr. Cole left the company in the early 80's, but continued to design the company's best selling "Star Fleet Battles" game. Mr. Eldridge sold the company to New World Computing in 1988. The company went through an additional change of ownership and is currently out of business.

The "Star Fleet Battles" series of games is currently published by the original designers, Amarillo Design Bureau Inc.

TFG published many games, including the "Starfire" series of games which were later novelized by David Weber into such books as "In Death Ground", "The Shiva Option" and "Insurrection". They also published historical games such as "Battlewagon" and "History of the Second World War".

Task Force Games also published a series of "Pocket Games", their version of microgames. [cite web|url=http://maverick.brainiac.com/cmm/tfg.html|title=The Maverick's Classic Microgame Museum|accessdate=2007-08-02] Several of these microgames were later expanded and released as board games. TFG microgames include:

*"Valkenburg Castle"
*"Starfire"
*"Asteroid Zero-four"
*"Cerberus"
*"Star Fleet Battles" and later "Expansion #1", "Expansion #2", "Expansion #3"
*"Prochorovka: Armor at Kursk" (later released as the board game "Armor at Kursk")
*"Intruder"
*"Operation Pegasus"
*"Starfire II"
*"Spellbinder"
*"Robots!"
*"Battlewagon"
*"Survival"
*"Ultrawarrior"
*"Star III Empires"
*"Moon Base Clavius"
*"The Warriors of Batak"
*"Boarding Party"
*"Escape from Altassar"
*"City States of Arklyrell"
*"Checkpoint Omega"

Many of the games were considered cutting edge for their time.Fact|date=March 2008 One distinct feature that many of them had was that unlike many wargames of that era, players often had a degree of customization over their armies--For instance, in the "Starfire" series, a player could design every component of his starships, and in Robots! A player could build his individual robots from a modular design, making tradeoffs in price and functionality between different movement and weapons systems.

References

Star Fleet Battles www.starfleetgames.com

External links

*bgg publisher|352