Retrospective: Mayday

These days, I find myself missing the late, great Game Designers' Workshop a lot. Maybe it's the recent release of a new edition of Twilight: 2000 by Free League or maybe it's just another manifestation of midlife melancholy. Whatever it is, I've spent much time over the past few weeks poring over GDW's impressive output, not least of which being its many fine Traveller products. 

As I never tire of saying, Dungeons & Dragons may be my first love, but Traveller is my true love. No matter how many years pass, my admiration for it remains stronger. If anything, it's only gotten stronger with the years, as I came to appreciate better many aspects of its design. One of those aspects is its modularity, something I've commented on before. Though Trtaveller is a complete science fiction roleplaying game, its three constituent books contain numerous systems and sub-systems that could very easily be games in themselves – and, in a few cases, were presented as such.

Mayday is an example of this. Originally published in 1978, a year after the initial release of Traveller, Mayday takes the RPG's starship combat system and turns it into a two-player wargame playable in, at most, a couple of hours. The original edition came in a ziplock bag, like the other "Series 120" games released by GDW (so called because they could be played in 120 minutes or less), but later editions came in boxes, a digest-sized one in 1980 and an 8½" × 11" one in 1983. In my youth, I owned the 1983 edition but, like so many of my older games, it fell apart and I replaced it with the 1980 edition I still own to this day.

The contents of the box are few: a 16-page rulebook, a sheet of cardboard counters, a single six-sider, and a handful of blank black-and-white hex maps. Anyone already familiar with Traveller's starship rules will find little surprising here, but newcomers might be surprised by several aspects of it. For example, each turn represents 100 minutes of time and each hex represents 300,000 km or one light-second. This is not a game of fast and furious tactical dogfighting of the sort one sees in science fiction cinema, but rather of slow, almost strategic combat over large distances. This, of course suits the style of SF that inspired Traveller, but it might take some getting used to if you're not well versed in the classics of older science fiction literature.

Another noteworthy aspect of Mayday – and indeed of Traveller starship combat in general – is its use of vector movement. The distance and direction a ship moves during its turn is based on the distance and direction moved in its previous turn. This means that even vessels with high acceleration ratings cannot simply turn on a dime but must slow themselves before being able to change course. This whole process is further affected by the presence of gravity fields from massive objects like planets. The end result is a game where mastering the movement system is even more important than mastering its weapons rules. It's very fun but I must confess that it took me a long time to wrap my head around how it worked. Even now, it still takes me a while to get into the proper frame of mind to play it.

That's a good thing in my opinion and one of the reasons why Mayday, much like Traveller, continues to appeal to me. Unlike other starship combat games, which, while fun, are little more than diversions, Mayday also manages to be thought-provoking. I don't mean that it makes me think deep thoughts about life, the universe, and everything, but rather that it demands I pay careful attention to the all the starships' vectors in relation to one another. I won't go so far as to claim this is a "thinking man's starship combat game," but there's little question in my mind that Mayday demands some brainpower to play enjoyably, never mind successfully.

I really do miss GDW.