You’re really not, and if you want to see proof that you’re not all you have to do is go to the administration building and click the Future Missions tab. But don’t let BARIS trick you into thinking that this abstraction and simplification means you’re playing a simple game. As befits its boardgame roots the two sides are almost perfectly symmetric, which at least ensures a level playing field even if it does cause the game to lose some of its flavour. There are no dollars or roubles in this game, only pretend money called “megabucks”. The types of rocket and capsule available to the US and USSR are functionally identical, being different in name only.
There’s a fair amount of simplification in BARIS. You get a budget to spend every year, the size of which depends on your prior achievements and the accumulated prestige accrued by your efforts to slip the surly bonds of Earth. There are two turns per year, and the game ends in 1977 (or when somebody lands on the Moon) so you have, at most, forty turns to achieve your goals. The game starts in 1957 – so just about pre-Sputnik – and you have almost complete control over what you do: buying new rockets, investing in R&D for capsules, training astronauts, scheduling missions and so on. It doesn’t have the broad sweep of knowledge that a game like Civilization imparts to the player, instead being fearsomely specialised in its particular subject area, but I guarantee you that when you get done playing a game of BARIS you will have a better grasp of how the R&D of new spacecraft worked during the space race than 99% of the population of planet Earth, being as it is woven into the very fabric of the game itself.īARIS casts you as the director of either the US or Soviet space programs. Not Liftoff, though, In Liftoff the rules and gameplay fit the theme – the technological duel for the stars between the USA and the Soviet Union during the late 50s and 60s – and it very definitely shows in BARIS.Īs a result I would probably nominate BARIS as one of the most educational video games in existence. A lot of boardgames come up with a core gameplay mechanic and then find a theme to fit to it, and this can end up producing a completely nonsensical disconnect as with Dominion. This means that BARIS is somewhat more abstracted than you might expect a computer game to be, but at the same time given the game’s roots it’s quite astonishing just how much detail they did manage to cram in here. It’s a computer adaptation of a boardgame called Liftoff!, and since the designer of the boardgame was in charge of the computer version it hews pretty closely to the boardgame rules. Bom bom bom bom bom-BOM-bom bom bom bom-BOM-bom-BOM-bom bom bom…īuzz Aldrin’s Race Into Space (or BARIS, as it is affectionately known) is an odd beast.
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