Escape from Altassar Play By Email Support Page By Walter O'Hara Back to the Play by Email Emporium

This game develops a very unusual premise.  ESCAPE FROM ALTASSAR is a two-player game which re-enacts the breakout of Confederation prisoers from a POW camp on the planet Altassar, policed by carniverous Spikus soldiers that need to eat corpses to "renew" themselves. 

NOTICE: This Gamebox is created using Dale Larson's excellent Play By Email utility, Cyberboard (the poor man's Aide De Camp!)

ESCAPE FROM ALTASSAR is copyright, Task Force Games, 1982.

Designer: Daniel Campagna

Development: R. Vance Buck

Turn Sequence

Escape from Altassar is absurdly simple to play, with one small wrinkle that will effect PBeM.  The turn sequence is as follows:

Spikus player starts

1. Movement Phase: the Spikus Player may move some, or all, or none of his units.

2. Combat Phase: the Spikus Player makes his attacks (Confederation player may make an Evasion check).

(at this point, the turn is emailed to the Confederation player, who is maintaining a current and a master, as per simultaneous movement). The Confederation player makes Evasion checks on his current turn, and saves those as a separate GMV file.  He then updates the Master game file with both the Spikus turn and his evasion checks.  I have included various forms of hidden movement methods for the Confederation player to play around with.

The Confederation player then repeats steps 1 and 2 above for the Confederation player, with no evasion check.

The Action

The graphic above illustrates some of the pieces and terrain of this gamebox.

Turn Record and Hidden Movement methods

As usual, I added the TFG non-existant turn track in case you were wondering what this is doing in the gamebox.

Hidden Movement Ideas...

	I call this tileset the "Stealth" set.  When you flip player pieces over, they will blend into grasslands (and sometimes, forests) perfectly.   Move into rocky, hills, or water terrain, and the piece can just be made out.   You can also move stacks around using the ?? counters
	This is the "Invisible Counter Approach", which puts an empty tileset on the flip side of units.  Good luck finding your units once they have been placed and flipped, though....

How to get the files

Download Gamebox:

Artifact Gamebox (zipped)

Related Links/Resources:

This page content copyright, Walter O'Hara 1998