Struggle for the Galactic Empire
WORKING
Struggle for the Galactic Empire. Board Game. Joseph Miranda, designer. Luca Oleastri, Joe Youst, artists. Decision Games (I), publisher. 2009.[1][2][3] Also available as a video game for computers.[4]
From the back of the box and company sites: "Struggle for the Galactic Empire is a solitaire science fiction game. You assume leadership of the forces of the Galactic Empire as it strives to maintain and expand its dominion while fighting off the forces of chaos that seek to destroy it. You make all the military, political, social and economic decisions to deal with the threats that arise, keep the far-flung empire stable, and still expand and bring new glory through discovery, colonization and conquest."[5][6]
The board game comes with a pamphlet including "Introduction: Struggle for the Galactic Empire," written by Joseph Miranda, giving the background story (so the game includes a brief but literal work of fiction). The point-of-view character of the Introduction is a "Supreme Satrap of the Periphery Sectors" who "loved precision. Precision made the empire work like a giant machine, revolving around that Core Sector that was it political, military[,] and scientific hub" (p. 2). So note the simile of "a giant machine" for a bureaucracy with satrapies, necessarily enclosing the peoples of the Empire. More specifically, note the graphics, especially the lid of the original box: images available with a Google search for the game title + "images" and/or available as of November 2021 here.[7] Pictured is a space battle, with one set of craft looking mildly biological in the bat, ray, skate family (plus a very slight hint of uncircumcised human penis), plus a strongly biological craft looking very much like a giant or colossal squid, for which cf. and contrast the Sentinels in the MATRIX series of films, and, less explicitly, the biomechanicals in the ALIEN series and elsewhere.[8] Note also the SF tendency to relate arthropods — although squid are cephalopods, phylum: Mollusca — to the mechanical.
There are also (passim), in addition to more strictly-military devices — including direct brain jacking into a warship's "Tactical Operations Cybergrid" — "nano-bot neural enhancers" and "cyber-implants" on the small size, and "starship mounted nano-constructors" in themselves presumably minute but used "to build a world-sized colony from matter harvested from [... a sun's] accretion disc" ("Introduction," p. 2). The "Introduction" makes explicit that warships have "organic appearing lines" that are "a quirk of imperial ship architecture that was supposed to maximize efficiency while generating terror in the minds of opponents" (pp. 2-3).
RDE, with thanks to Roger Mason, 15-16Nov21
