In those days spirits were brave, the stakes were high, men were REAL men, women were REAL women, and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were REAL small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri. – The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
J.U.M.P. Into The Unknown (which I will refer to as JUMP from now on) is a strategic-level space strategy game in which you control a starfaring power, expanding to create an empire and crush your opponents. It joins an honored list of similar games including Stellar Conquest and Twilight Imperium. Since I have not played many of these games, however, I will be reviewing JUMP on its own terms.
(For those curious, J.U.M.P. stands for Justified Use of Military Power, and seems to be a series name, with other games in the pipeline. More on this at the end of the review.)
The game begins with setting up the map (more on this later) and the construction of initial fleets. Players have a variety of forces at their disposal, from fighters and battleships to ground troops and fortresses. All units, regardless of type, are capable of interstellar travel – ground troops have their own transports. (I liked all these. The units are different without the game being overly complex, and you don't have to worry about transport units.) However, no units may move if they are not part of a fleet. A player’s fleet markers (only!) are placed on the map, leaving the composition of enemy fleets a mystery until a battle takes place.
Each player has a record sheet on which they write down the forces making up each of their fleets, as well as values for the planets (star systems) in their empire and forces stationed at those planets. Such a system is obviously not going to be everyone’s tastes, but it works relatively well.
In each turn, the players go through the following phases together:
1. Initiative
2. Movement
3. Diplomacy
4. Combat
5. Building
In the movement phase, players act in initiative order. Movement is pretty simple – move up to three hexes, with the wrinkle of various space hazards (asteroid fields, nebulas, and black holes).
In the following diplomacy phase, players with fleets at neutral planets get to roll to determine the reaction of the planet’s inhabitants. At the beginning of the game, each player picks a disposition for their empire which affects diplomacy: each neutral planet has a disposition as well, and is more likely to be friendly to an empire with the same disposition. The neutral planet’s production value, tech level, and disposition are randomly determined, as is the planet’s reaction, which can range from Ally (planet joins the player’s empire) to Xenophobic (attacks the player’s forces immediately). Allying planets add their forces to the player’s own.
When combat occurs, it is broken down into several phases. The first is space bombardment, or long-range fire. Then, fighters clash until only one side remains; surviving fighters will get to choose the targets they destroy in regular space combat. (Ordinarily, the player who takes losses decides which units are destroyed – they could even be units that are unable to fight in the current round, like ground troops in a space battle.) After that, rounds of space combat are played out until one side or the other is destroyed.
Combat is resolved by rolling a die for each ship on each side. Each unit type has a combat value which is the die roll required (or less) to destroy a ship in the enemy fleet. Fighters, for instance, have a value of 1, and battleships have a 4.
After space combat is over, a player attacking a hostile planet who won can land ground troops on the planet to take it over. First comes bombardment from surface against the landing troops, and then (paralleling space combat) multiple rounds of ground combat until one side or the other is destroyed.
Overall, I liked the combat system - it gives a good feel of space battles and planetary assault.
After all combats are resolved, players get to produce new units and fleets, and to buy technology. Players can build units at any planet in their empire, but fleets can only be built at the homeworld. Tech advances can improve movement, production, and combat abilities, but they are expensive – and determined randomly after points for them are spent.
The game also comes with quite a few optional advanced rules (including rules for retreat from combat and pre-plotted hidden movement), and a full twenty different victory conditions you can use in play.
Life, don't talk to me about life – Marvin
The rules individually are pretty straightforward, but it felt like a lot while playing. They are laid out so that you can follow them page by page as you start to play the game. There is a table of contents, but unfortunately, information on a single topic is not always all in one place, and so I found the rules bad as a reference.
The rules are also maddeningly unclear at times. For instance, the units in a fleet or defending a planet are generally unknown. Nowhere in the rules does it clearly lay out when this information is revealed to other players. A player has to know when they pick their fighter targets in combat, but what about when a player must decide whether or not to drop ground troops on a planet? The rules simply do not say when or if the defensive forces are revealed in advance. I did find an indirect statement in one of the optional rules, but there simply should have been a section of the rules defining this clearly.
Neutral planets are a really sore spot for me. For starters, the diplomacy rolls can simply make or break a player. In our playtest game, my friend got ally after ally result, adding their forces to his and harnessing their production immediately. I, on the other hand, got neutral results from planets for several turns running. I should probably have given up after a second neutral result and attacked the planet. Here, however, the rules are silent: they don’t say whether you get to find out the neutral planet’s forces in advance, and in fact they don’t seem to have any mention of attacking neutral planets at all! Further, the forces defending a neutral planet can vary widely, and the production value of the planet has no effect on this.
The random results of research are just stupid. If my neighbour is building battleships which can bombard at long range, I can't research the same thing by choice. I must roll... and maybe I'll get asteroid navigation. Yeah, that'll really help when his fleets attack.
If rolling large numbers of dice doesn’t appeal to you, then you won’t like JUMP’s combat system. In principle, it’s perfectly reasonable: roll a die for each ship, looking for their combat strength. But the weakness of the system was shown in a fighter combat involving two dozen fighters on each side, each of which only scores a hit on a roll of 1. It took a [I]long[/i] time to resolve. Now, I understand wanting to have a difference in combat strength between a fighter and a battleship, but at least in fighter-fighter combat, fighters should have an improved combat strength to resolve this phase of the battle more quickly. Wake me when they're done combat, please...
The initiative system is very important in the game. Going last is hugely powerful, because you get to move all your fleets after your opponents, and enemy fleets entering the same system as your own apparently do not stop your forces from leaving. You can bid production points on initiative order (high bid gets the first pick of spot) but I think that the results of this are just too powerful. Who can afford to bid more points? The players who are already winning. I think the game would have been better with just about anything else.
Mechanically, the game rules are mostly good. But the balance in initiative and the randomness of diplomacy and research can really skew the game in ways which have nothing to do with player skill.
OK, so ten out of ten for style, but minus several million for good thinking, yeah? – Zaphod Beeblebrox
I have not yet addressed JUMP’s components. What do you get for the money you put down on this game?
The game is played on a hex-map made up of three cardboard sheets, which the game suggests can be arranged in several ways. The maps have an appropriate space backdrop - black with stars. Two of the maps also show reddish galaxies in the background.
The map isn’t complete, though, without the six hexagonal overlays made of clear plastic. They show coloured planets and navigation hazards and are placed on top of the map, in any orientation that aligns with the hex-grid. This is probably the best system I’ve seen for creating a different map for each game, short of building a map out of individual terrain tiles (as seen in Settlers of Catan, for instance).
The game also includes some small round markers, and larger ring-shaped markers which indicate the ownership of planets. Rectangular fleet "flags" (put in provided stand-up plastic bases) show where your fleets are, keeping the identity of each fleet a secret only known by you. All of these pieces are black with shiny lettering or icons on them (in the case of the fleet flags).
Finally, the game provides two dozen record sheets, and some small sheets of thin cardboard with charts for determining tech advances, neutral planet forces, and so on.
These all seem fine. Unfortunately...
The counters are not made out of cardboard, but thick paper. I understand that the plastic map overlays or the printing on the player may have been expensive, but these paper counters are simply unacceptable. I can see these becoming bent and worn quite quickly.
The lettering on the counters is shiny, but I found that glare off of the plastic map overlays actually made it difficult to read them. The colours were not all well chosen – two of the player colors are silver and light blue, which are hard to distinguish.
Remember those red galaxies in the backdrops on two of the maps? They make it difficult to read the names of the planets printed on the plastic overlays.
The small round markers are [I]much[/i] too small (about a quarter of an inch). They’re fiddly and are going to be easy to lose. The sad thing is, I think there was room on the paper sheets for these counters to be larger; they seem to be that size only because of they need to fit on the charts for tech advances and the turn order track (which are on the small cardboard sheets).
As if these small counters weren’t bad enough, we also found the plastic overlays easy to accidentally shift on the map. Try to keep the dice off of the map while you make all those combat rolls...
To top it off, some minor complaints: the box is pretty flimsy (arriving in the mail quite damaged), and the record sheets cram so much information into one sheet of paper that you have to write everything small, particularly your unit purchases.
After thousands of years, the fleet arrived, where, due to a terrible miscalculation of scale, it was eaten by a small dog – The Book
Overall, JUMP is a reasonably good game, but it is marred by too many flaws for me to recommend it. I would give the basis of the rules (substance) a 4, but I have to dock a point for the vagueness of the rules, and another for the bad game balance.
As far as style is concerned, I would have given it a 3, if it weren’t for all the flaws in the components.
Final note: My copy of JUMP (the rpg.net review copy) also came with the two JUMP: Genesis packs which can be played as separate games or expansions for JUMP: Into The Unknown. These expansions include unit counters and rules for four different alien races. I expect that using the counters will reduce the bookkeeping aspect of the game a great deal, but the expansions will not really address most of my concerns with the game. Since they were given to me, I do plan on writing a separate review of JUMP: Genesis for rpg.net.
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(Due to spamming, old forum discussions are no linked.)