Description

Starship is a fairly elaborate tactical simulation of a contact between two starships, each of which has an mission that is unknown to the other ship.

One player's ship is designated as the "intruder" and the other is the "intercepter" (sic). At the beginning of the game, each player secretly chooses a mission. The possible missions vary depending on the player's role, intruder or intercepter.

The missions include reconnaissance, space exploration, piracy, raid, and patrol (under either a "cold war" status or active hostilities). Each mission provides conditions for a "strategic victory" (such as capturing the other vessel, making peaceful contact, etc.) and orders which, if violated, will prevent the player from gaining a "command victory" (e.g., a player might be ordered to not fire first). Victory points are given for strategic, command, and tactical victories (the latter being based on ship damage), and these are compared to see who won (if anyone, as a possible outcome is that neither player wins).

The game takes place in three-dimensional space, but the hex map is only used to show the relative positions of the ships. Markers placed on the map show a ship's vertical distance above or below the plane. A small map can be used because at the start of each turn the map is effectively rotated to put the Z-axis at the center along the line between the ships.

Players write down and execute their movement and firing orders simultaneously. The main concern in battle is preventing one's systems from overheating, which can occur due to acceleration/deceleration as well as combat.

While the game's envelope gives the publication year as 1976, all the components say 1975. It seems possible the envelope was added to the game after the first copies were produced.