Draft:High Frontier (board game)

High Frontier is a board game themed around space exploration, created by game designer and aerospace engineer Phil Eklund, and released through his own publishing company, Sierra Madre Games. There are four versions, the oldest being Lords of the High Frontier - aka Rocket Flight - followed by High Frontier, High Frontier Third Edition and more recently, High Frontier 4 All.

A unique feature of High Frontier is the accuracy with which rocket physics are implemented in order to simulate spaceship movement on a planetary map. In the game, players embody private or government space agencies striving to explore the solar system and exploit resources beyond Earth.

Lords of the High Frontier aka Rocket Flight (Sierra Madre Games, 1999)
Phil Eklund was inspired to design the first version of Rocket Flight in 1978, long before the founding of Sierra Madre Games in 1992, after reading Gerard K. O'Neill's book The High Frontier then joining the L5 Society.. . The game consisted of a dozen typewritten copies that included a two-piece, plastic-covered map on which the rocket's location, altitude and vector would be tracked using a grease pencil.

The game was set in a future year 2020, where players act as spacefaring companies trading and researching technology in different productive areas. Rocket Flight maps, printed on black and white paper, consisted in a hexagonal grid that reflected Delta-v, rather than distances.

In 1999, Sierra Madre Games released a new version of Rocket Flight in a zip bag with the title Lords of the High Frontier, as part of Phil Eklund's Lords game series.

High Frontier (Sierra Madre Games, 2010)
This is the first reimplementation of the game, released in a cardboard box which contained cards, tokens, plastic miniatures and a mounted board. This was also the first appearance of the game's iconic map. In it, the hexagonal grid has been replaced by a series of interconnected points representing energy states, on a full-color background.

The map in the base game featured only the areas of Sol, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars and the asteroid belt. A board extension was published that same year to include Jupiter and Saturn. It also featured two additional diagrams: one to track solar cycles and one for managing space politics.

A new expansion, Colonization, was released in 2013. It came with a new map replacing that of the previous expansion by adding Uranus, Neptune and several trans-Neptunian objects such as Pluto, Charon, Haumea and Sedna on the area previously occupied by the solar cycle and political diagrams. These could now be found printed on the back of the rulebook.

This expansion also added four new modules to the game:

Freighters: introduces a second spaceship that can be used for transport. In addition, promoting a freighter allows all of a player's factories to move on the board independently, and adds a new special victory condition called 'Future'.

Bernals: a Bernal is an orbiting space habitat where human colonists can live, and where water tanks - the game's currency - may be stored.

Colonists: allows a player to recruit and promote a variety of space pioneers who grant that player special abilities, political votes, protection against breakdowns, additional operations and access to 'Futures'.

Gigawatt Thrusters: allows transportation of colonists and Bernals to sites as distant as Neptune or beyond and also adds 'Futures' when thrusters are promoted.

High Frontier Third Edition (Sierra Madre Games, One Small Step, 2017)
The Kickstarter campaign for the third edition of High Frontier was successfully funded on 1 August 2015. For this crowdfunding campaign, Phil Eklund partnered with publisher One Small Step (OSS), who would be materially responsible for bringing the game to fruition. The game was delivered two years later but suffered from a number of production issues, the most notorious one being the misspelling of the author's name on the back of the box.

In May 2017, Phil Eklund terminated the contract with OSS on basis of his being disaffected from the development process after submitting the original game files. In his statement, Eklund denied rumors that he had deliberately chosen to stay away from game development, and lamented having been ignored by OSS in all his attempts to contact the publisher.

Despite all these troubles, the third edition is an outstanding product. It includes two mounted boards: one is the original map, updated and aesthetically improved, the other is the map for Interstellar, a solitaire expansion that already existed in the previous edition but for which there were no physical components. By flipping and joining both boards, a double-size game map can be formed.

The game box also includes four books:

Training Guide (24 pages): a guide to learn how to play from scratch, with a label on the front page saying 'Read this book first'.

Colonization (68 pages): the complete rulebook divided in two parts - the Base Game and the Advanced game also called Colonization, which includes the modules already appearing in the High Frontier expansion of the same name but modified and expanded with new items.

Interstellar (28 pages): rules for the expansion.

Reference Guide (64 pages): includes solitaire variants and a strategy guide for the Advanced game, as well as a set of experimental rules and an explanation of the technologies depicted on both sides of every patent card in the game.

High Frontier 4 All (ION Game Design, Sierra Madre Games, 2020)
In August 2018, in a reply to a question in BoardGameGeek, Phil Eklund reports that he has sold Sierra Madre Games to Swedish publisher ION Game Design as a means of getting out of his company's tax debt. As part of the purchase agreement, Phil becomes employed by ION and continues developing his own games.

Intended to be High Frontier's definitive edition, the High Frontier 4 All crowdfunding campaign launched on Kickstarter on 26 October 2019. The campaign ended successfully on 16 November, with nearly 5,000 backers contributing a total of $363,745 towards funding the project. The game was finally delivered to its backers in 2021.

Learning the game
High Frontier 4 All proposes a progressive way to teaching the rules and flatten the learning curve imposed by such a complex game. The core game box includes several booklets - a Read Me First guide, followed by:

Space Diamonds (8 pages): a "lightweight, family-friendly race through the solar system" that helps the players get used to travelling and learning the map.

Race for Glory (28 pages): the equivalent to the Base Game in third edition, it provides a simplified set of rules - like patent cards with merged supports, seasons or events not affecting gameplay and a somewhat more streamlined movement on the map - for a number of pre-defined scenarios.

Core Rules (56 pages): contains all the rules needed to play the Advanced Game, including a module for politics but excluding the rules introduced by third edition's Colonization.

Appendix (40 pages): includes several game variants and scenarios, and an explanation of the technologies depicted on every patent card in the base game.

Modular design
In High Frontier 4 All, game modules from previous editions have been split from the base game and released as expansions - thus allowing for a better and more in-depth rules coverage - and new modules have been designed.

List of published and planned expansion modules:

Module 1 Terawatt & Futures (2020): includes Freighters, isotope-fuelled Gigawatt and Terawatt thrusters, and Futures.

Module 2 Colonization (2020): includes Bernals and Colonists.

Module 3 Conflict (2021): introduces a new Political Assembly board and rules for Combat, War and Anarchy.

Module 4 Exodus (2023): first newly designed module in the series, introduces Contracts, space-born Colonists, cybernetic implants, an isotope bank and Exodus - a spaceship with interstellar capabilities.

Module 5 Economy (in development): enriches the game with a corporate finance and stock market setting.

Additional content
ION has released a few extras for the game, such as a tool pack (Tools 1) in 2024 that includes, amongst others, a Jump Start variant allowing players to start the game with a functional rocket, an asteroid-based factory and a Home Bernal.

In promotional pack The Station - a cross-over with Matt Eklund's own design Stationfall - an orbiting space station is placed on Earth's cycler that houses Project X, a high-risk, secretive research program. If the station is at any time destroyed as a result of impacts from floating debris in LEO, the project is released and the game is permanently affected by the negative consequences of this event.

There is also a neoprene mat version of the game board, that increases the size of the original game board from 60x90cm (23"5/8x35"7/16) to 90x135cm (35"7/16x35"5/32).

Bios game series
Although High Frontier 4 All is a stand-alone design, it can also be played as part of a grand campaign called Bios:Earth. The campaign involves a number of game designs by Phil Eklund and simulates the evolution of life on Earth from the time of the first microorganisms - ca. 3.5 billion years ago - to the age of interstellar travel - 22nd century and beyond - at which point humans have departed a troubled solar system in search of a new home.

After each play, some aspects of the final state of a finished game may be passed onto the next game as starting conditions. This may contribute to a certain degree of asymmetry between players during game setup, but most importantly, it provides them with a sense of continuity and long-term achievement as they play each game.

In this setting, the prequel for the events in High Frontier is Phil Eklund's Bios: Origins (2nd Edition). Origins covers 200,000 years of history, during which different human species - such a Neanderthals and Hobbits - compete to settle, domesticate, develop technologies and shape the political legacy that will be recaptured by the different lobbies and factions in High Frontier.

High Frontier 4 All subsequently focuses on the exploration of the solar system from year 2020 to 2124, with the goal of establishing colonies and industries beyond Earth's orbit and eventually plan an ad astra mission to bring humans to the stars.

Building on this exploit, the sequel, Interstellar, follows the pilgrimage of a scanty crew of human cyborgs to star systems beyond Sol, in order to find a habitable planet and preserve human biological and ideological legacies.

Reception
High Frontier is praised for its original theme and its realistic abstraction and gamification of astrophysical concepts. It is a game principally aimed at experienced players - for instance, High Frontier 4 All has been voted as the second heaviest game on BoardGameGeek with a weight rating of 4.82/5.

The following editions have been nominated for the Golden Geek Awards:

High Frontier, 2011 Golden Geek Most Innovative and Thematic Board Game

High Frontier 4 All, 2020 Golden Geek Heavy Game of the Year

Works inspired by High Frontier
In 2008, publishing company Ad Astra Games presented the first version of an improved ruleset for Rocket Flight, under the title High Trader. According to the publisher, development went through several hurdles and finally stagnated after three versions of the game had failed to materialize into a functional design. By the time designer Eric Finley had managed to produce a playable version, the project stalled again and was ultimately abandoned in 2010 when Phil Eklund released High Frontier. However, there is currently no way to find the game's files or rules, nor Ad Astra Games ' press release, on the internet, leaving us with very little information about the game.

In 2023, Australian publisher of role-playing games Half-A Press Pty Ltd released a TTRPG set in the universe of High Frontier: 60 Years in Space, created by Andrew Doull. The core book is 386 pages long and can be expanded by four additional modules: All (T)Errors are My Own, A Lot of Zeroes, A Facility with Words and This Space Intentionally, for a total of 1,800 pages of adventure rules.

In an article published in Medium, author Andrew Burbine has applied graph theory to model High Frontier's map as a nodal network and visually represent the shortest paths between all sites in the inner solar system