Guernplan – A VGA Planets Game

VGA Planets is a brilliant multiplayer turn based strategy game

Over the years VGA Planets is probably the computer game I have spent the most time playing – it is also probably the cheapest. It came on three floppy discs, posted from America, and once installed you got a dodgy user interface and suspect graphics inspired by various sci-fi genres. What you also got was an incredibly rich mixture of races to play and a huge variety of gameplay styles underpinned by a demanding economic model.

Playable with up to eleven players, each of which controlled a unique race, you competed to expand your stellar empire. Economics were simple yet incredibly difficult to master – it was not uncommon for newbies to completely mine their homeworld to the core in the first few turns and shortly after run out of fuel to move their ships. Combat was just as simple with individual ships fighting each other two at a time, there was no fleet combat. Now you would think this gave the races with the biggest ships an advantage – which it did, to a point. Races with with smaller ships had special abilities, such as cloaking and robbing to allow players to adopt sneaky tactics – all of which added brilliantly to the character of the game. You were constantly learning new tactics and always weighing up which ships and races had the edge in certain situations.

The game is still out there

None of this is lost software. The original still runs, the reference we used to settle arguments is still up, and the game is still being played.

The VGA Planets splash screen on black: the title in green over a small red-and-yellow planet, copyright 1991-1996 by Tim Wisseman, with Start and Exit buttons.

The Original

VGA Planets v3.00

Tim Wisseman's DOS original, 1994, on the Internet Archive. Not playable unless you download and install on a DOS machine but this is essentially the same game as we played.

archive.org
The site's logo: the word Donovan's set diagonally in white on a pale blue field.

Reference

Donovan's VGA Planets Super Site

The best fan reference there has ever been for the game: every race, every hull, every formula, and the answer to most of the arguments a host has to settle. Frames and all.

donovansvgap.com
The Planets Nu start screen: a blue-lit planet against a starfield, with the VGA Planets Nu logo over it.

Modern Version

Planets.nu

The faithful successor — the same game rebuilt as a browser client, with games you can join today rather than waiting a month for eleven people to send a turn.

planets.nu

Will Guernplan ever return?

Probably not, but I wouldn’t rule it out. More recently I have been working on my own space based PBeM game tentatively called LCOG (Lost Colonies of Guernsey) which is into it’s third test game.

The game archive

I’ve collected up the scores and maps for the games we played – eleven of them – and put them on the game archive page.

The Guernplan site during game 11, showing the turn counter, the score chart and the situation report.

Our Games

Game Archive

Every game has its final scoreboard, its score chart, its star map where one survived, and the roster of who played which race.

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