Geek Alert

The Fates smiled upon me. I managed to replace a couple of long lost games this week; Security Station & Car Wars. Some of the regulars may recall a series of "microgames" that were published back in the late 70's early 80's. They were produced by startup gaming companies and sold in small hand sized cardboard or plastic boxes (sometimes ziplock bags) to keep the packaging costs down and sold for around $5. The contents were usually just a fine-print rulebook, some cardboard chits to represent players of adversaries, and a fold-out hex or grid paper playing board. But despite the meager physical contents, a lot of these games had fantastic gameplay. Usually designed and published by people who where avid gamers themselves.

Metagaming Concepts, based in Austin Texas, launched the first line of micrograms. They produced a long list of titles like Melee, Advanced Melee and Wizard as part of what they called The Fantasy Trip line that used the core rules from the initial Melee system. One of these Fantasy Trip games was called Security Station: a post nuclear game (1-6 players) where you explore a deadly abandoned automated...Security Station.



Being a child of the Cold War and brought up on all sorts of Post Holocaust SciFi stories and movies I immediately gravitated to this one. No idea what happened to the original one, missing some 25-30 years now. Its very hard to find one these days in good condition with all parts, so I was thrilled to stumble across on in Very Fine condition. I look forward to trying it out.

One of Metagaming's best designers (Steve Jackson, creator of Metagaming's hit OGRE) left to start his own company, Steve Jackson Games. Metagaming folded but SJ continues on today.


One of his first biggest hits was Car Wars, best described as automotive gladiatorial games with machine guns, missiles, grenade launchers, etc. Jar(egg)head was actually the person to first turn me on to Car Wars. I lost my original 1983 microgame copy (the one that came in the hardshell black plastic box) in one of my moves but managed to find well maintained replacement (with 4 supplements). I'm giving serious consideration to taking it to ComicPalooza this year to get Steve Jackson to sign it.