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Striker Zero

Striker is the armor miniatures wargame of the Traveller universe since 1981. Using 15mm miniatures with individual vehicles and infantry fire teams as the basic unit, Striker provides a detailed system for Trav ground warfare.

Striker's handicap as a game system was its elaborateness and detail; it was the first game in the Traveller family to show the "Monstergame Carcinoma" that plagued GDW's later releases. The complex vehicular design system later metastasized into the even more complex and detailed Megatrav and TNE design sequences, which reached its superdetailed peak in Fire, Fusion, and Steel, where the player had to design not only the vehicles, but every weapon on board and every round of ammunition used. (And Internet FF&S boards demanded and added even more detail!)

Long before this, the game had lost all appeal to anyone with a job or a life. This was also the period of the "Magic Card Extinction Event", which put heavy evolutionary pressure away from Monstergames into simpler and faster-moving game systems.

During this period (the mid-Nineties), I first heard of a new SF armor-miniatures wargame, recommended as a replacement for Striker: Dirtside II.

Dirtside II is one of a family of three SF wargames by Ground Zero Games (GZG) of England; all are designed for simplicity and speed of play:

Dirtside II is Copyright ©1993 by Jon Tuffley; Stargrunt II is similarly ©1996 and Full Thrust ©1992; all are published by Tuffley's small-press company, Ground Zero Games of Suffolk, England. Rulebooks are highly professional and well-organized, on slick paper in A4 format (the European equivalent of American 8 1/2 x 11).

Recommended theme music for Dirtside and Stargrunt: