STARFORCE

The Stellar Display in 3D

A shift planner for SPI's 1974 game of interstellar conflict

Every star on Redmond Simonsen's map, lifted to its printed Zulu. Turn the volume, measure the true distance between any two LiteZulus, and see the odds for every type of shift, straight from the 1974 rules.

The Shift Planner measuring a shift from Tau Ceti to 82 Eridani: 13 Lites, with the odds for each type of shift and where a Mirror Shift would land.
Open the Shift Planner

Works best on a computer or tablet. Free, no sign-in.

What it does

Turn the map

See all 73 stars at their printed heights, above and below the plane, from any angle.

Measure a shift

True distance between any two points, the Overshift odds for S, ES, GS, EGS and GGS, and where a Mirror Shift lands.

1974 and today

Compare Simonsen's star positions with modern measurements and see which stars have moved.

How true distance works

Count hexes across the map, subtract the Zulus, and take the slanted side of the triangle. Case 7.52 from the rules, worked out in three dimensions.

Diagram of StarForce case 7.52: from 1819/+7 to 1922/+2 is 3 hexes across and 5 Zulus down, a true distance of 6 Lites.

The whole Stellar Display

All 73 stars plus Sol at their printed hex and Zulu. White stars sit above the plane, pink stars below it, as on the original map.

Three-dimensional view of the StarForce Stellar Display with every star at its printed height.

Redmond A. Simonsen, SPI’s long­time art di­rec­tor, de­signed StarForce in 1974. It was the first game he de­signed en­tire­ly on his own. Its Stellar Display looks like a flat hex map, but every star carries a hidden third co­or­di­nate: the number after the slash is its height above or below the plane of Earth’s equator. John Boardman and George Heap com­piled the star po­si­tions; Simonsen turned them into a playing surface. Measured against a modern star catalog, the map holds up re­mark­ably well. Of the 68 stars that can be matched today, 40 sit at exactly the Zulu that current data gives them, and 24 more are off by a single Lite. The few that miss by more are stars as­tronomers have since mea­sured farther away. Even the pink Zulu limits are exact: they step down with hex dis­tance from Sol, so the playable volume is a sphere with a radius of about 22 Lites, drawn as rings on a flat sheet.

The rules are just as precise. Building the Shift Planner meant turning every table in the game into code: the True Distance Table, the Maximum Shift Table, the Overshift results, the Mirror Shift and the rule that keeps a mir­rored StarForce on the map. Not one of them re­quired guess­work. Every worked example in the rule­book comes out exactly as printed, from a six-Lite shift out of 1819/+7 to a twenty-five-Lite Gate-to-Gate jump out of 1319/+1. In “The StarForce Tapes,” talking with John Boardman and Neil Shapiro, Simonsen said a holo­graph­ic pro­jec­tion was what he had in mind when he vi­su­al­ized the map. This page simply draws what he imag­ined. Good game design and good soft­ware demand the same dis­ci­pline, rules exact enough that a machine cannot argue with them, and StarForce had it from the start.