Task Force Games
Industry | Gaming |
---|---|
Successor | New World Computing |
Founded | 1979 |
Headquarters | United States |
Key people |
Allen Eldridge Stephen V. Cole |
Task Force Games was a game company started in 1979 by Allen Eldridge and Stephen V. Cole. Eventually 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.
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. This game series was taken over by the Starfire Design Studio.
TFG 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.[1] 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
- Starfire 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. 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
- ↑ "The Maverick's Classic Microgame Museum". Retrieved 2007-08-02.