When you read histories of videogaming, you might well be excused for thinking that it all sprang full-blown from the brow of Nolan Bushnell, or possibly Steve Russell, or maybe Ralph Baer or Willy Higginbotham had something to do with it. If there's any attempt to reach back before then, the talk is all of pinball and arcade amusements.
Occasionally, someone will remember that maybe Dungeons & Dragons had an influence, but that's about it as far as debt to tabletop goes.
This is, of course, utter nonsense in so many ways; for one thing, it's a console-centric view, when innovation in Western games at least was for decades based in games for home computers. And computer game designers were, by and large, inspired by tabletop games, not by pinball, of all anti-intellectual pursuits.
Stellar Conquest, long out of print and almost forgotten, is a case in point. It is the original 4X game.
Two to four players at opposite corners of a 2D hex-tesselated star map begin with a handful of ships and colonists. When you visit a star for the first time, you draw a card to see what its colonization potential is, and if you have colony ships along, drop colonists on it. Populations and production capacity grow year by year, and you build new ships to expand your burgeoning stellar empire. You also spend resources to improve your starfaring and weapons technologies. Ultimately you encounter the other players, and inevitably warfare begins.
Exploration, check. Expansion, check. Exploitation, check. Extermination, check. While there may have been fan-generated games with some of these elements before, this is the first time (1975) that they'd all been seen together in a commercially published game. This is also, to my knowledge, the first appearance of the "tech tree," a mechanic of obvious importance for a slew of other game styles -- like RTS, say.
Reach for the Stars, the first digital 4X game, was designed by Roger Keating and Ian Trout of SSG, a company founded with the specific mission of bringing the kinds of gameplay seen in board wargames to home computers; the game was specifically inspired by Stellar Conquest. All subsequent 4X games derive directly from this root.
nostalgia!
Definitely not forgotten... I still have a copy around here somewhere... I played this game a lot as a kid with my dad. He's got a bunch of old wargames, but not too many with a space theme, and those were my favorites (star wars and all). We had a few similar games from that era. Another one we played a lot was called Alpha Omega (1978), it was more of a ship to ship combat game that used sheets where each ship had orders to execute for the next turn (which was done simultaneously) and damage boxes to be filled up, much like battletech did later...
My almost-first SF boardgame
Actually, SC was my first SF boardgame, because Lou Zocchi's Alien Space was played on the floor.
I bought SC via an advert in Boy's Life magazine in late 1974. It was a very early edition, no illustrations, folded paper rules folder, plastic map. I still have most of the components.
The early issues of The Space Gamer were full of deeply nerdy analysis of the game, with strategy and variant articles and Winchell Chung illos of the various spacecraft.
I doubt it's still in print, but Avalon Hill reprinted SC as "Galactic Conquest." Nice new board, a few very minor rules changes.
The first edition of Masters of Orion is SC with some chrome. They use much the same terminology. Enough so that Howard Thompson could probably have sued them if he wasn't in hiding.
Galactic Empire
Don't forget Galactic Empire. I played this on the Apple ][ well before Reach for the Stars existed. Very much a classic 4X game although it was single player as best I recall.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galactic_Empire_%28Br%C3%B8derbund_video_ga...