A Chart to Help You Play High Frontier (4th ed.)

(It's not as complicated as it looks)

My gaming in recent months has consisted mostly of just two games—my beloved Advanced Squad Leader, and Phil Eklund’s space masterpiece, High Frontier, which is now in its glorious fourth edition.

Now I have a little bit of a love-hate relationship with this game. I love the outer space theme and the fine-tune mass-balancing that goes into planning a trip out into the solar system. But it always drove me crazy that I had such a poor handle on the “supports” (radiators, reactors, and generators) required by your spaceships and robonaut/refinery proto-factories. This was especially true when the supports themselves needed supports. So I was making these absurdly complicated (and heavy) configurations that took forever to get into space. And even when I did manage to create a few factories, I never seemed to match the “spectral type” of the planets (those are the letters: C, D, H, M, S, and V) to the patent cards I had.

So I decided that if I was going to play this game, I needed a system to organize the cards, their supports, their spectral types, and their upgrade (i.e. black side) possibilities all in one place. And since that place didn’t yet exist, I created it using Pixelmator. It’s at the top of this page. Behold! There’s even a legend in the top corner to explain how the schematic works.

My creation is 7680 x 4320 pixels—which is what I tried to upload. But it might be the case that Substack has a maximum resolution. If you’re looking for the super high-rez version (for printing—in which case I suggest 11 x 17, at least), email me.

Happy space-surfing.