Introduction

What is this?
Buzz Aldrin's Race into Space is a (loose) PC adaptation of the board game called Liftoff! BARIS is centered around the idea of the space race, America vs the Soviet Union in a race to put a man on the moon and bring him home safely. It features all of the equipment that was either used, or even considered to be used back in the 60s and 70s for the mission to the moon and allows you a lot of freedom in terms of what you want to do.

How does it work?
In a nutshell, you decide what programs you want to buy and research them up as much, or as little as you want, schedule up missions to space, hand pick your astronauts from the game's lineup, and slowly work your way up to setting foot on the moon. Money has been abstracted down to 'MegaBucks' for simplicity sake, and your yearly budget is based off of a concept of Prestiege, which you gain from space missions. Being the first to do something will get you a lot of prestiege, where as catastrophic, death causing failures will lose you a bunch.

Okay, how's the LP going to work?
I'm going to let you guys call the shots for the Americans. I will provide you all of the data on the equipment you can buy/research, your budget, and all of the mission types available to you. It will be up to you guys to decide what you want to do and I'll input the appropriate moves for you. I am not, however, going to help you.

Well why not?
I'm going to be playing as the Soviets, of course. The main reason for this is that the AI is... actually pretty good at playing the game, and would more than likely just destroy the goon hivemind. The other reason is that I, while I have a general idea of what I'm doing, am not particularly great at the game. As such, I get the feeling that I'll be at roughly the same skill level as the goonmind will probably end up playing at. Lastly, America gets the first move, so I figured I'd let you all have it.

Don't worry, I'm not going to throw you entirely to the wolves, the first post I make will explain your options to you as best I can, and I'm more than happy to answer any questions you might have that aren't things like 'help what should I do'.

Most of the updates will be in screenshot form, as the game is pretty menu based, but I will provide videos of the missions in action. Also, I suppose I should note that I'm playing a fan-made windows port of the game that fixes some bugs that were in the old, floppy based DOS version I have. It has a few bugs of its own, but nothing game-breaking has popped up in my testing of it.

Now then, shall we begin?

Final Stats: Real World