Science Fiction Hobby Games

Book excerpt: Science Fiction Hobby Games serves as a history and guide to tabletop gaming franchises set in original science-fictional milieux. Its subject is the pen and paper role playing games and model and counter based wargames that preceded modern videogames and still evolve alongside them, as well as the gamebooks, board games, card games and postal games that are their less famous cousins. Included are detailed critical overviews of more than a hundred fantastical universes published between 1969 and 2013, along with essays on popular types of tabletop game and the natures of their settings and stories. Throughout, sf games are treated as an integral part of the long history of science fiction, and as a new way of enabling its explorations of the future and other worlds. Based on the author's contributions to the Hugo Award winning third edition of the Clute and Nicholls Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, this book contains an extra 20,000 words on additional games and other topics, specially written for this new version of the text.