Boarding Party Review

Boarding Party Review

Review by David Lent

Boarding Party is an old microgame from Task Force Games that was released in 1982. It can be played solitaire or with two players. The basic premise is that the spaceship Ulysses and its human crew enter combat with a Destructors spaceship – a robot ship programmed to eliminate all forms of life. Both ships are disabled early in the battle and it is up to the crew of the Ulysses to board the enemy spacecraft and fight past the robot crew to get to its command computer and destroy it before the robots can repair the ship.

The components in Boarding Party are a 12-page rulebook, map and 54 counters (some of which are blank).

Boarding Party’s rulebook is very simple and has a nice picture on the cover. Actually, it’s the only good artwork associated with this game. The rules are very simple and easy to understand. This is obviously a game meant for beginners.

The counters represent multiple types of human crew and different types of robots. In addition there are counters representing blast packs and some informational counters. These counters are quite possibly the most lack-luster counters I’ve ever seen in my life. None of the crew or robot counters have any combat or movement information on them. In addition, the crew counters all look exactly the same except for an abbreviation identifying what type of crewmember they are. They don’t even identify what kind of weapon the crewmember or robot has. The robot counters all have the same picture and just a letter to identify what kind of robot they are.

The map has all 4 levels of the robot spaceship and the primary features are locked doors, shock doors, upward gravity shafts and downward gravity shafts. There is also a combat results table printed on it along with a defensive chart, which has “yes” or “no” counters to show if doors are locked on a certain level or if the shock doors are active on a specific level.

Victory conditions in this game depend on whether you are playing the solitaire or two-player scenario. In the solitaire game, you have to either destroy the command computer by turn 14 or destroy all the repair robots. The two-player game is won by the player with the most victory points. Victory points for the two-player game are awarded for controlling the command computer at the end of the game and for destroying enemy units.

The gameplay in the solitaire scenario is very simple. The humans choose which airlock they will enter the ship at and then randomly place “yes” and “no” markers on the automated defense chart. Next, he rolls to see how many blast packs he will get. The robots are setup in certain places according to the rulebook at the beginning of the game. During the game, the humans move through the ship and the robots move randomly. If a human goes through a shock door and it turns out to be activated, he is killed unless he is an electronics specialist. The electronics specialist can wait by the door to keep it from triggering while the rest of the crew goes through it. If a door turns out to be locked, an explosives expert must use one of his blast packs to blow it up. If the humans enter any room with robots a fight occurs.

Combat in this game is extremely simple and simultaneous. You first consult the rulebook to see what weapons the humans and robots are armed with (obviously, it would have been too difficult to print this on the counters). Next, you roll for each weapon and look it up on the combat results table to see the result. Humans with blasters are the first to get killed in groups of more than one human. Robots generally shoot to kill, but slaver robots will try to incapacitate a human with a whip if there is only one human present. If slaver robots encounter any unconscious humans, they will capture them.

When the humans reach the command computer an alarm sounds and all the robots start moving towards that room. The humans first have to have at least one human shooting at each robot in the room, but the rest of the humans may fire on the computer. It takes a total of 30 damage to destroy the computer.




The two-player game is pretty much the same as the solitaire game, except each turn the robot player may directly control 3 robots. The rest have to move randomly though. In this scenario, you do not destroy the computer and instead try to control the computer room at the end of the game.

There are some shortcomings in this game. First, you don’t have an informational marker to mark people as unconscious. Second, there is not enough room in some of the rooms to hold all the human and robot counters. Third, as mentioned before the counters need to have weapon and movement information printed on them. Fourth, some rooms don’t have numbers printed on them so robots cannot randomly move through them.

This game is very simple and was obviously meant for beginners. There is nothing wrong with that, but the game is way too easy and the components don’t help the game. I really like the story and concept and would like to see a modern rework of this game using much better artwork, counters, map and deeper rules. In addition, I would like to see more scenarios such as a mission to rescue captured humans or something. This game doesn’t have much re-playability. Despite all the complaints I have about this game, I did have a little enjoyment in playing it though.