Space: The Ultimate (Boardgaming) Frontier
A homage to Phil Eklund’s masterpiece, High Frontier, on its twenty-fifth birthday.
This year marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of High Frontier, the space-travel-themed boardgame first marketed by German-American aerospace engineer Phil Eklund under the name Rocket Flight back in 1999. As games go, High Frontier is long, complicated, and difficult to master. There’s lots of math. And success requires painstaking analysis and preparation—which can all be undone in an instant by even the slightest oversight or miscalculation. In other words, it’s a lot like real-life rocketry.
This isn’t the first time I’ve gushed to Quillette readers about Eklund’s genius. Back in 2019, I wrote at length about his Nordic-survival-themed game, Greenland, co-created with Philipp Klarmann. That game situates players in eleventh-century Grœnland, amid a tooth-and-claw struggle featuring Norsemen, Inuit, Tunit (an ancient, but now extinct ice-fishing people, often referred to as Dorset), and their elusive prey. It was the experience of playing Greenland that first got me interested in Indigenous history—which, in turn, led to the Nations of Canada series that Quillette’s been publishing since mid-2023.
Jonathan Kay
Whatever one thinks of the actual gaming experience that Eklund’s unique creations provide, he always delivers fascinating lessons in history and science along the way. Pax Renaissance, which Eklund designed with his son Matt, casts players as bankers seeking to profitably manipulate the religious and political turmoil of sixteenth-century Europe. Pax Porfiriana models the Mexican political struggle that took place during the twilight of Porfirio Díaz’s dictatorship. Pax Pamir (co-created with Cole Wehrle) centres on Afghan tribes playing Great Game power politics with Russian and British colonial invaders.
To call Eklund a polymath is an understatement. Other games he’s designed concern the mechanics of blimp warfare, microbiology, and (I swear I’m not making this one up) soil erosion.
As you might have guessed, none of these games have gained much of a mass-market following among casual gamers. But among dedicated hobbyists, he’s something of a living legend. And High Frontier—or, more properly (in its latest incarnation), High Frontier 4 All—is widely seen as his greatest masterpiece.
While this is a game about space, it’s absolutely not some dice-and-meeple take on Buck Rogers or Star Wars. Rather, High Frontier offers players a competitive exercise in managing the economics and physics of mid-to-late-twenty-first-century space exploration. It puts you in the shoes of a CEO who’s trying to transform extraterrestrial forms of colonisation, resource extraction, and industrial development into a viable business model.
While Quillette isn’t a speciality boardgaming publication, our core audience does tend to exhibit a robust interest in technology and futurism. I learned this five years ago, when I curated a multi-part series about colonising Mars—This Martian Moment—which attracted a surprisingly large readership. High Frontier will help teach such readers what creating a human presence on Mars—and the rest of our solar system—would actually entail.
And in this regard, the first lesson you learn in High Frontier is that the most important substance in space is also the most important liquid here on Earth—water. The game’s basic economic unit is the aqua, equal in value to the cost of boosting 40 tonnes of water into low-Earth orbit. Within the game, the stuff acts equally as money and rocket propellant (and can be freely switched from one to the other when your rocket is in low-Earth orbit).
As Eklund puts it in one of the rule book’s 54 footnotes, water is no less than “the key to the solar system”:
No place in space has resource value without a local supply of water, primarily for rocket propellant and “exofuels,” but also for chemical and mineralogical processing, dust control, crops, and life support. Water is a storable and convenient source of hydrogen, the superior propellant for thermodynamic rockets. Water is a natural shield against energetic protons, kilo for kilo better than [common solid materials]. Finally, without recycling, each man-year requires 10 tonnes of water.
The importance of water drives High Frontier gameplay from first to last, not just during the tricky logistical process of boosting and manoeuvring one’s rocket components and crew into and around space, but also in selecting their destination.
The stylised solar-system map that functions as High Frontier’s game board presents a blizzard of planets, moons, asteroids, and comets to visit, prospect, and potentially exploit (assuming you’ve managed your fuel supply properly, survived radiation bombardment in the Van Allen Belts, and avoided burning up while entering atmospheric sites along the way). But a new player will quickly realise that only a few of them offer much attraction to a start-up space corporation that’s still relying on 2020s-era rocketry technology.
The handful of useful sites are the ones that lie relatively close to Earth and offer significant hydration: principally Mars and its moons (Phobos and Deimos), and the larger asteroids such as Minerva, Ceres, and Vesta. There are also a number of ice-rich comets—but their extreme orbits present an extra complication, as they can be reached only during particular phases of the in-game sunspot cycle. (Plus, matching a rocket’s approach path to the surface of a rapidly spinning comet obviously carries additional risks.)
The menu of viable destinations expands later in the game, however, as more advanced technologies comes on line—at which point, one can journey out to the frozen realms surrounding Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and beyond.
Some of the footnotes to High Frontier will be hard for non-astrophysicists to decipher. Eklund’s explanation of how a rocket might match its orbit with a synodic comet, for instance, makes casual reference to calculations performed using something called “Edelbaum’s Equation and Shoemaker Tables.” But most of his capsule science lessons require no Edelbaumian expertise whatsoever—as when Eklund quotes Bob Heinlein’s pithy saying that “once you’re in orbit [around the Earth], you’re halfway to anywhere.”
Zack FizellThe idea here is that the hardest part of space travel isn’t necessarily cruising through the vast inky blackness of the cosmos; but rather the more mundane, fiery, and inelegant process of burning “as hot and fast as possible” so as to escape Earth’s gravity well. That’s why the majority of a rocket’s launchpad mass (in High Frontier, as in life) typically consists of the propellant required to reach orbiting altitude—following the unforgiving exponential law first formalised by Russian scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky more than 120 years ago.
To be successful at High Frontier, you’ll have to overcome all the above-listed challenges (along with several others I don’t have space to discuss), and build an archipelago of automated factories throughout the solar system, which in turn will produce not only exotic rocket components but also (assuming you’re playing with the High Frontier game expansions, as I suggest you do) mobile factories, freighters, and bernals (orbiting space settlements and logistical hubs)—all of which put the old-fashioned terrestrial technology you started the game with to shame.
Or… you may simply flounder around on Earth, trying to assemble mismatched components into a functioning rocket before watching your ungainly creation suffer a mechanical glitch that sends your engineering team (i.e., you) back to the drawing board.
In one of my first games, I spent four hours designing a rocket that could land on Mercury. But I miscalculated the propellant requirement and ended up getting trapped in space instead. During that same game, my friend Mark made a similar mistake trying to get to another planet (I forget which), and then crash-landed while executing an aerobrake landing with an empty fuel tank. (He got up from the table and went home without finishing the session.)
Despite having played High Frontier at least two dozen times, I still screw up. In a game last Sunday against my regular partner, I executed a complex plan that required me to build an exotic freighter on Vesta using that asteroid’s vestoid minerals, fly it to a cloud station orbiting Venus, and then build a powersat station that could be used to beam power back to the asteroid belt. Unfortunately, the whole plan fell apart when it turned out that the crew had neglected to bring along the humble electrical generator needed to make the required in situ resource utilization module operational. I then spent the rest of the game figuring out how to salvage the mission by getting a generator from Earth into low Venus orbit.
High Frontier is full of maddening subplots such as this (some of which my friends and I still remember and talk about many years after the fact). If it weren’t, it wouldn’t feel like a real space-exploration simulation; since this is a field where nine hundred and ninety-nine things can go right, but the one thing that goes wrong causes a multi-billion dollar investment to become a crater on some distant space rock. There’s a reason Elon Musk runs a rocket-ship assembly line that pumps out new models every few days: Many of these things are destined to explode.
Like all great dramas, a well-played game of High Frontier breaks down into three acts. During the first, you’re still on Earth, managing tech patents and boosting rocket parts into orbit. In act two, you’re out in space, on your first tentative missions, staking claims on new worlds. By the third act, you’re zipping around the solar system at will using advanced technologies, and fulfilling epic quests—erecting space elevators, setting up astrobiology laboratories, or even escaping our solar system altogether.
It’s this last act of High Frontier that’s the most fun, of course—as it comes closest to the cinematic sci-fi world that presents the galaxy as a giant playground for space cowboys. But it’s also the most speculative—some might even say, scientifically dubious—as Eklund concedes in one of his footnotes:
Because of delta-v costs [i.e. the cost of propulsive manoeuvers, including escaping gravity wells], it will always be cheaper to derive [even the most valuable materials] from marginal locations on Earth…Even if a platinum-rich asteroid were found, platinum would be obtained cheaper by re-opening a depleted low-grade mine on Earth. [And so], if extraterrestrial raw imports will never be economical, is there anything left to drive exoglobalization? [The answer is yes:] Increasingly, [it will be] processes rather than raw materials [that] are most important for industry. Space processes can control the gravity, vacuum, radiation, temperature, and energy density to degrees impossible on Earth. These characteristics, the forgotten resources of space, can produce high-strength membranes using surface-tension effects, long whiskers and gigantic laser crystals grown in microgravity, nano-engineering using ultrapure vapor deposition, strong glassy materials produced by exploiting a steep temperature gradient, and alloys mixed by diffusion alone. Relatively small machinofactured and nano-produced objects, including pharmaceuticals and bio-tech, will be the first space imports to Earth.
It’s just possible that the youngest people reading this will live long enough to witness such exotic extraterrestrial imports arriving on Earth. For the rest of us, including me, High Frontier is as close as we’ll come. So if my description of the game intrigues you, give it a try. (If you don’t like reading rule books, there are a number of how-to-play videos for you to watch on YouTube.)
And if you do take the plunge, I’d urge you to enjoy the thrill of riding the Solar Olberth Flyby at full crew-capsule thrust. Don’t let the skull-and-crossbones icon dissuade you!
Granted, it’s extremely dangerous, and odds are strong that you’ll have difficulty getting your ship back to Earth, even if the crew survives. But based on this humble layman’s astro-calculations, there’s really no quicker way to the moons of Jupiter.
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