My First Wargame: Reviving 'Revolt on Antares'

If you don't count playing Risk as a kid of nine with a bunch of adults on a camping trip, then Revolt on Antares was my first proper wargame. And it was infatuation at first sight. I had already been playing D&D for two or three years when I first clamped eyes on this game. I immediately recognized Jeff Dee's style on the cover art from his illustrations in the D&D books, and the idea of such a little box containing an entire game from D&D's publisher, TSR--"The Game Wizards," don't you know--was too enticing to pass up. 

It was spring of 1981, and my family was on vacation in the Boston area to visit some close family friends (the Dashes) who had left Dayton, Ohio a couple of years prior. They had one son a couple of years older than me (Adam) and another almost exactly my age (Benji). In retrospect they could both be kind of obnoxious at times, but when they weren't, we found ways to have fun together. Our parents were quite tight as friends, and every other Sunday we would alternate between going to the Dashes for the day or having them to our place. Coincidentally, on one of these occasions it was Adam who brought over the Holmes Basic D&D set that introduced me to the game in 1979.

The Dashes had relocated to Framingham, Massachusetts, and one night we went to the mall in their neighborhood. Outside of a game store stood a cardboard standee with cubbies filled with the new line of TSR mini-games. I'm not sure how long I looked all of them over before picking Revolt on Antares, but it retrospect it was the luck of the draw because Antares has gone on to be considered the best of the TSR mini-game line. (I've subsequently in adulthood acquired them all.)  

My "pal" Benji made fun of me for spending $4.95 of my vacation money on that "tiny little game." His mocking abated after we played it and both had a blast. 

Back in Dayton I kept playing it with childhood friends, including my best school chum, Casey Dean. I know this because my copy still has our scores and "recruitment point" tallies. I only found one occasion in adulthood to crack the game open, while on vacation at the Outer Banks with another guy who had fond childhood memories of it.

The little envelopes I kept each faction's chits in. I was a compulsive organizer even then.

Back in 2016 I had a strong pull to revive some of those things that brought me such joy as an adolescent and teenager. I dusted off the Milton Bradley game Shogun and took it to a game day gathering at my local library, and while doing so I stumbled upon Revolt on Antares again. The diminutive size, which had been such a virtue in my youth, was now clearly going to be a source of frustration for these middle-age eyes and fatter fingers. The paper map was too flimsy to lay flat any longer, and the little chits were near-impossible to read, even with reading glasses, and so small and thin as to make moving and stacking them on hexes a fun-sucking chore. I knew before I asked any of my other middle-age friends to play it with me that I would have to fix these physical limitations.

My copy from 1981, with original dice!

This set me on the path in 2016 of recreating the whole game at a size about 50% larger. Scanning 84 already loose chits was going to be a nightmare to work with on the scanner and then in Photoshop, so I ended up procuring a new, unplayed copy on eBay for about $15 with the chit sheet intact and unpunched. I set about scanning the chit sheet and map, and then spending a few hours cleaning it all up (e.g., removing fold lines from the map, refining the art on the chits to increase their contrast/readability, etc.).  

And then I got distracted and let the project sit unfinished for four more years.

Last week I remembered I had never gotten this project across the finish line, and so I ordered some Scrabble tiles from Amazon and got to work on the remaining digital restoration work necessary to print and construct this middle-age boys version of Revolt on Antares.

A couple hundred cheap Scrabble replacement tiles from Amazon.

My enlarged and "enhanced" counters (left) ended up about 50% or so larger and far more legible than the originals (right).

I simply used a glue stick, which worked better than I anticipated to affix the paper counter images to the wooden tiles.

These are going to be so much easier to pick up, stack, and move around the map board.

The enlarged map compared to the original, which is starting to show its age.

One of the things that's so lovable about the game is all of the great characters, implied plot lines/backstory, and "world building" that lurks in the rule book's scenarios and short descriptions of the factions and galactic heroes controlled by each player. The prime TSR-era art beautifully reinforces this, with characters and spacecraft designed by the likes of  Jeff Dee, Erol Otus, and Bill Willingham. I hated leaving all of this flavorful text stranded in the rule book, and to help game play and immersion I created character cards for each faction leader and each galactic hero in the game, with an even larger portrait than what appears on the chits. I also created a reference sheet for the ancient alien artifacts that can be recovered and used throughout the game to help your house's family win the battle for Imhirrhos, the ninth planet of Antares. And because I still had fuel in the crafting tank, I went ahead and cobbled together a couple of spare copies of the rule book that will hopefully keep my original from finally giving up the ghost and falling to pieces. 

Front and back of the "Leader" cards. The cards weren't something in the original game, but I thought they'd aid play and immersion in the game's world.

The "Hero" cards I created. It's good fun recruiting these characters throughout the game.

Laminated artifact sheet and a couple spare copies of the rule book for at-the-table reference.

My wife Ellen saw me working on this much of last weekend, and though she isn't a gamer, she's volunteered to play it with me this coming Friday night. Love in the time of COVID-19 is a beautiful thing.

...and if Ellen won't play, Cha-Cha has already called dibs on Messalina from House Orsini.

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