After centuries of fighting, man finally accomplished what he had attempted for centuries: the destruction of the world he lived on. After the last and greatest war, some people survived underground. But radiation had penetrated even there and they were forced from their new homes. They rebuilt their great cities as floating platforms to carry them above the radiation belts that now encircled their planet. Some launched themselves to safety before it was too late, but others were slow or miscalculated. Their sky born heirs were mutated, some horribly beyond belief, others invisibly. The centuries passed and the radioactivity began to fade away. The sky cities began to look for ways downward to the planet. But they found each other first, humans and non-humans, as allies or competitors. Then started what man had left off: WAR.
You are the ruler of a sky-city. Your objective is to capture or destroy your enemies, and find an opening in the radiation belts. The action occurs in the upper atmosphere, about 55 to 75 miles off the surface of the Earth.
WAR OF THE SKY CITIES is an exciting two-player science fiction table top game, where players become rulers of complete cities in the sky. Each side has small scout/research centers, medium battle cities, and/or large battle cities. There are two objectives: capture or destroy your enemies and find an opening in the deadly radiation belts surrounding a future Earth. In addition, optional rules introduce the use of small fighter craft and airborne landing parties. WAR OF THE SKY CITIES is a game of tactical "air" combat, but instead of aircraft you command large floating cities with their own engines, armour and weapons.
The components include two pages of cardstock counters and a cardstock reference sheet (printed on one side).
Game Scale: Each inch represents 200 miles.
1 comment:
Weirdly nostalgic for me, like many Fantasy games Unlimited products. Remember playing this on the floor a few times during high school game club meetings - it's a real space-hog, like many naval/space combat minis games of the era, although this one used flat 2D counters. FGU has it for sale as a pdf last I looked.
Mechanically, it's a fairly mundane starship combat game thinly disguised as an air combat rules between floating cities. There's no altitude or 3D elements to the rules at all, which rather defeats the purpose of it being air combat in the first place, and the cities only have four facings (front, rear, left, right) defining their firing arcs and hit locations. Objectively it's pretty dull even for 1979, but it is playable. I suspect the game may have been inspired in part by James Blish's Cities In Flight (despite bearing no real resemblance to the book) with a mashup of some old pulp scifi (which was also fond of floating cities/forts/airports etc.).
If you want a very similar theme (ie huge floating fortresses battering each other into scrap) but more depth and replay value I'd recommend Task Force Games' Asteroid Zero-Four, which is a duel between nuke-armed US and Soviet asteroid bases hucking missile strikes and flights of bombers at each other. It's all very retro-Cold Wars and doesn't pretend to be about air combat.
Post a Comment