Draft:High frontier

High Frontier is a series of board games themed around space exploration, designed by Phil Eklund and released through his own publishing company Sierra Madre Games. The first title in the series was Rocket Flight - aka Lords of the High Frontier - after which came High Frontier, High Frontier Third Edition and High Frontier 4 All.

The theme throughout the series is the exploration of our solar system and the exploitation of its resources by private as well as governmental space agencies.

There are four versions of the game:

Rocket Flight aka Lords of the High Frontier (Sierra Madre Games,1999)
The first version of Rocket Flight dates back to 1978, long before the founding of Sierra Madre Games, and consisted of a dozen typewritten copies including a two-piece, plastic-covered map on which the rocket's location, altitude and vector could be tracked using a grease pencil.

In 1999, publisher Sierra Madre Games - founded by the designer in 1992 - released a new version of the game in a zip bag as part of the Lords series, to which the following titles belong:


 * Lords of the Sierra Madre (2nd Edition, 1995), later reimplemented by Pax Porfiriana (2012);
 * Lords of the Renaissance (1996), reimplemented by Pax Renaissance (2016) and Pax Renaissance 2nd Edition (2021);
 * Lords of the Spanish Main (2006), reimplemented by Pax Hispanica (2024).

The game is set in a future year 2020, where players acted as private companies specialized in different production sectors.

Rocket Flight maps, printed on black and white paper, consisted in a hexagonal grid that reflected Delta-v, rather than distances.

High Frontier (Sierra Madre Games, 2010)
First reimplementation of the game, released in a cardboard box which included cards, tokens, plastic miniatures and a mounted board. This is also the first appearance of the game's iconic map, in which the hexagonal grid gives way to 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, Earth, Mars and the asteroid belt. That same year, an expansion was published that included a board extension 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 were now 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 around the board independently, and adds a new special victory condition called 'Future'.

Bernals: A Bernal is an orbiting space station where human colonists can live and where aqua tanks - the game's currency - may be stored.

Colonists: Allows a player to recruit and promote space pioneers providing special abilities, political votes, protection against breakdowns, additional operations and even 'Futures'.

Gigawatt Thrusters: They allow transportation of colonists and Bernals to sites as distant as trans-Neptunian objects and they also add 'Futures' upon being promoted.

High Frontier Third Edition (Sierra Madre Games, One Small Step, 2017)
The Kickstarter campaign for the third edition of the game 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 disaffection from the development process after he had submitted the original game files. In his statement, Eklund also denied rumors that he had deliberately chosen to stay away from the game's development, and bitterly complained about having been ignored by OSS in all his attempts to contact the publisher.

Despite all these troubles, this third edition is truly memorable. It includes two mounted boards: one is the original map updated and easthetically 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 - although the map could be ordered in poster format through an online printing company. A particularly welcome feature is that by flipping and joining both boards, the game map can be formed in double-size.

The game box also includes four books:

Training Guide (24 pages): a guide to learn how to play from scratch, with a note on the front page saying 'Read me 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 a technical description for both sides of every patent card in the game.

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

That same year, Bios: Origins is released to the market under the seals of Sierra Madre Games and ION Game Design. The game is a reimplementation of Origins: How We Became Human, a 2007 design by Phil Eklund. In 2019, the Pax series of games is expanded with the release of Pax Transhumanity, designed by Phil's son Matt.

Intended to be the definitive edition of the game, 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.

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.

Below the list of current expansion modules:

Module 1 Terawatt & Futures (2020): includes Freighters, isotope-propelled 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 brand new module, introducing Contracts, space-born Colonists, cybernetic implants, an isotope bank, and Exodus - a spaceship with interstellar capabilities.

Module 5 Economy (in development): plans to enrich the game with a stock market and corporate investment setting.

ION has also released a few extras for the game such as Tools 1 (2024), which includes amongst other things a Jump Start variant allowing players to start the game with a functional rocket, an asteroid-based factory and a Home Bernal.

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

Other implementations of High Frontier
In 2008, publishing company Ad Astra Games presented the first version of an improved ruleset for Rocket Flight, under the name High Trader. According to the publisher, development went through several hurdles until its complete stagnation after three versions of the game had failed to materialize into a functional design. Designer Eric Finley finally managed to produce a playable version, but the project stalled again and was ultimately abandoned in 2010 when Phil Eklund presented High Frontier.

There is currently no way to find the game's files and rules, nor Ad Astra 's press release on the internet and there is actually very little information about the game.

In 2023, Australian publisher of role-playing games Half-A Press Pty Ltd presented 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.