Star Fleet Battles Lives Again

In a struggle that took more than two years to resolve, the Amarillo Design Bureau (ADB) announced over the weekend that it had finally wrestled the Star Fleet Battles (SFB) license from Task Force Games (TFG), making the newly renamed ADB Inc. the sole source of SFB products.

Star Fleet Battles, designed by Steve Cole and ADB, is a Star Trek-based board game of detailed starship combat that has been played in some form, fashion, and print since the mid-1970s. The game had been published and distributed by Task Force Games since that time, but ADB's growing disapproval of TFG's practices finally led to the breakup and the struggle for the all-important SFB license.

A formal statement will be made within the next week or so, and Paramount/Viacom, which maintains the use of the licenses (and with which ADB has had many struggles as well) is expected to clear the deal in the next few weeks. Ultimately what this means is that many of the out-of-print products will be reprinted, and there will be many new additions coming down the pipeline in the near future, some of which TFG refused to print.

So what does this mean for computer gamers? One important thing to note is that Interplay's upcoming Star Fleet Command game is based in part on Star Fleet Battles, but Interplay had to tiptoe around some issues regarding licensing. With ADB Inc. running the show on the board game end, Star Fleet Command now has the potential to be a better and more truer-to-form game than before, though the makers of Star Fleet Command are obviously looking at "bigger and better" in a computer simulation and now have more room to run with.