"Best Sci-Fi board wargame. " Topic

Any scale from skirmish to army is fine. Can include miniatures or cardboard counters. Looking for wargames specifically as opposed to Space-opera or space-horror games.

Azhanti High Lightning.

Does your definition of 'wargame' include conflict games with significant amounts of diplomacy? I have a couple of favourites of that sort.

Absolutely. Take what I said above pretty liberally. If it's a good game, post it.

Dune
(just played this recently with some very nice print-and-play components!)

Cosmic Encounter

Merchant of Venus (AH Version)
Imperium (GDW)
Battletech
Ogre

28mm Fanatik, how is Attack on the SDF1? I have it, and started to read the rules, but they were laid out in a way that made my eyes glaze over and I haven't had time to really dig into it. I'll make time soon, but if you've played it, I'd love to hear your thoughts.

2nd on Battletech.

Star Wars X-Wing (either 1.0 or 2.0) are a lot of fun, though I don't think that counts as a board game.

Star Wars Imperial Assault and Rebellion are both great board games.

Twilight Imperium is fantastic as a 4x game

I really enjoy Star Trek Ascendency

Cosmic Encounter

AH Starship Troopers. Nothing like a good Bug hunt.

Azhanti High Lightning

GDW's Imperium (avoid the Avalanche Press remake) is hard to beat. The only game I've seen where the loser rearms for the next war while the winner lets their armed forces dwindle during the peace. The game was way ahead of its time and has held up well through the almost 40 years it's been out.

Any without power swords, storm hammers, claws,under ranged missile weapons, flags and banners, knightly armour, tanks that look like WW1 vehicle's or m113 kitbashs, or mechs, and has opportunity fire before close combat…or no close combat at all. Those get my vote.

@TGerritsen

I agree. This game takes more effort to learn because the rules layout and formatting are not optimal for holding our attention. Try playing through the sample turn sequence and go from there.

Back in the day, we wore out Cosmic Encounter and 4000 AD.

-Awful Green Things from outer space
-Ogre (the original )
-Gev
-Horus Heresy (the original with cardboa pieces, not the latter with plastic),
-Armageddon (the GW game)
-Space Hulk, 2nd, 3rd, & 4th Ed's,
-Starship Troopers.

Risk! 2210 AD

Apparently, this is my go-to boardgame answer now …

Ogre, GEV and Shockwave.

Invasion Earth GDW ( A lot of strategy required requires defense in depth, it takes place in entire solar system. Invasion fleet has to worry about supply lines and supporting ground forces after they have landed.)

Renegade Legion Prefect, a great game of planetary invasion. The Awful Green things from outer Space and Invasion of the Air Eaters by Metagaming. I almost forgot one other, Godsfire a terrific space game.

Hows Heroes of Black Reach? I totally missed that one when it came out.

Might as well go with the trifecta of Renegade Legion Interceptor, Leviathan, and Centurion for tactical systems.

So many of the above, plus:

+ Sucking Vacuum
+ The Level 7 series (Escape, which is co-op; Omega Protocol, which is closer to Space Hulk; and Invasion, which is a global Risk-meets-XCom melee)
+ Buck Rogers and the XXV Century

Renegade Legion Centurion, if you like grav-armor. Actually, that whole series is good. Interceptor is the space-fighter game, Leviathan is the massed capital ship game.

Battletech, if you like mecha.

Last Frontier: Vesuvius Incident is a very good solo board game.

Space Hulk is a very good bug hunt.

Buck Rogers /XXV century
Ogre

Triplanetary-especially the latest version

Battletech

Car Wars

Ogre/GEV

Lift Off-

War In The Ice(SPI)

Ogre/GEV/Shockwave (SJG)

Fifth Frontier War (GDW)

Invasion Earth (GDW)

Asteroid by GDW

Some very good choices there ! We did like AH's SST, OGRE/GEV, Space Hulk … And GW's SM1/AT/CT … but it was 1/2 baked.

Can't beat Ogre.

Oh, and my avatar blushes,… Rivets!

How's Heroes of Black Reach?

It's a good game, a 40K-ized version of the popular WWII game 'Heroes of Normandie' with great looking counters (more like oversized tiles): TMP link

I'm a fan of the system so I'm biased, but it's also highly rated on BGG:
link

Boardgames:
Twilight Imperium
Eclipse
Void Empires
Star Wars Rebellion

Wargames:
Stargrunt
Full Thrust
and many many more

SPI's Starforce

SPI's Starsoldier. Better representation of Starship Troopers combat than the AH game. It'd be interesting to see this re-done without the infamous si-move plotting (same goes for StarForce), geomorphic maps, and more force variety.

Thanks all for the good suggestions so far. I've already been shopping on BGG since this list started.

One interesting observation, it seems like there were more ground based (Tanks/Infantry) SF games made in the 70s and 80s than there are currently. I wonder why that would be.

I loved games like Ogre/Gev when I was a teen. I would dig seeing more SF games between the scale of Squad Leader and Panzerblitz.

The Creature that Ate Sheboygan needs to be mentioned. On a quick run through I have not seen Star Fleet Battles or Starfire listed either.

Well, I honestly wouldn't include SFB in a list of 'best' board games. Winning the game basically comes down to 'who better remembered some rarely-applied rule out of 750pp of rules'.

I thought I was the only one to like SPI's War in the Ice!

Back in the day, as teens, we loved playing Invasion America, WWW3, Objective Moscow, Titan Strike, Car Wars and Ogre. We didn't like the Star Force series, as the plotting of SiMov was tedious to us. Also liked Marine: 2002, which was from Yaquinto, as was Shooting Stars and Asteroid Pirates.

Mind you, none of these are exactly current, although Ogre has been re-issued and I also understand the original designer of Marine 2002 has also redone the design and re-issued it. Was seriously considering buying a copy, although I haven't played an SF boardgame in ages.

It's a set of hard SF lunar tactical battle scenarios between the US and the Soviets. link The newer version adds to it apparently, letting you fight on moons other than Luna. link

Risk: 2210 AD
Risk: Star Wars (the Battle of Endor game)
Risk: Star Wars The Original Trilogy Edition. (Best instruction ever, to the Empire player: "Your goal is to eliminate the Rebel forces. Wipe them out. All of them.")
Risk: Legacy (It's an alternate Earth, with alternate forces from alternate other Earths.)
The Awful Green Things From Outer Space
Ogre
Star Trek Panic! (Great co-op game, even if you're not a fan of the series.)
Space Hulk
Firefly, the Game (my jury is still out on this one, but it's definitely shiny! Best looking paper money in any game EVER.)
Planet Busters (a Tom Wham original)
Starcrusher! (What's that? It's my own creation, sort of a re-themed Ogre, but with different play and combat structures. Anyway, *I* like it…)

I have more in my game cabinets, but these are ones I'm most likely to play.

Also haves, but less likely to play:

Risk: Star Wars, Attack of the Clones Edition. (Really good version, actually, and the thematic elements are great. I just like OT edition better.)

Risk: Star Trek. (Includes tribbles, but alas, they blew it on theme. Rather than have Klingons, Romulans, Orions, Cardassians, Borgs, etc., it's just a mix of the Federation ships from TOS, TNG, DS9, Voyager, and Enterprise duking it out in a contest set up by Q. Love the ship models, but what a stupid premise and an opportunity lost.)

Buck Rogers: Battle for the 25th Century. (Just got this, and haven't played it. Great components, and some nifty twists (the planets move in their orbits, changing the transit times for your ships!). Seems like a light version of A&A type rules. I'm eager to try this, but I just can't weigh it yet.)

Battleship: Galaxies. (Neat combat concept, based on the original Battleship game but with a random element. Card-based activation, which is fine, except that all your spaceships won't get to move in a turn, which makes no sense in a space battle! Great components, not yet sold on the play.)

Godzilla: Kaiju World Wars. Richard Berg game. (Great little models of Godzilla, Rodan, Mechagodzilla, and King Ghidorah, with stackable skyscrapers to destroy. Rules are a bit wonky, alas. Jury still out.)

Triplanetary. (It's got big fans and a pedigree, but I've simply never played it. It's not in my gaming group's oeuvre, as it were, so it's just not likely to hit the table any time soon.)

Frag. (New to me. Looks like a fun, tabletop version of an FPS. I think with the full complement of 6 players, this could be a hoot. But haven't played it yet, so jury also out.)

The Han Solo Card Game (from Solo). As sold, it sucks (like the film). But with my own newly created rules, designed to actually make it a viable betting game, I think it could be decent.

By the way, Dune is coming back!

TMP link