Strategy of the Galactic Heroes

Strategy of the Galactic Heroes is a strategic wargame based on the novel series Legend of the Galactic Heroes written by Yoshiki Tanaka. Simulating the rise and fall of the Galactic Empire and the Free Planets Alliance in a galaxy far in the future. As the leader of the Galactic Empire or the Free Planets Alliance, the player builds space vessels, conducts fleet battles and competes for control of star systems. A turn lasts one month and each ship unit represents a group of about 1,000 - 2,000 ships.

Legend of the Galactic Heroes is one of my favourite shows of all time and I wanted to play a board game that recreates the epic feel of the series. I was sad to find out all of the LoGH war games were long of out print and very expensive second hand. Out of those I was drawn to this fan game because it had both the strategic layer of conquering the galaxy alongside the tactical fleet combat.

This game was originally published in Game Journal Vol. 40 in 1995 as fan (doujin) game without the official license. Game Journal started off as a fan newsletter but relaunched in 2001 as a professional magazine that still releases today including a historical war game in each issue.

This was a fairly straight forward translation. I’ve obviously not changed any rules, but I did change some terms to closer match English board/war gaming conventions. Most of the localisation work was figuring out the best way to explain these rules in English. A more literal translation would have been playable but not very pleasant to learn from.