Game Designers' Workshop, 1983, 2 players, "basic complexity". In the game of Asteroid, one player takes on the role of a "mad computer" which has taken over a mining colony on an asteroid and sent it flying towards the Earth. The other player commands a heavily armed media expedition sent to disable or destroy the computer and save the Earth from certain doom (and presumably film a documentary about it along the way). It's semi light-hearted inasmuch as the overall flavor and spirit of the game embraces all of the time-honored traditions of bad Sci-Fi movies. The mad computer commands an assortment of robots that attempt to pick off the invading humans one at a time as they search for the location of the computer. The human player has a number of different winning conditions, based on how well he does against the computer and how many of his people he manages to get off the asteroid. Playing pieces are extremely cheap - the "board" is nothing more than eight sheets of paper and the pieces are typical chintzy cardboard tiles (I hates them, I does). This game looks and feels like it cost about 10 cents to produce. The tactics are fairly simple, although the rules are not particularly well organized and actually getting going was something of a stop and go affair as we jumped back and forth between different sections of the rules. It's not a bad game. In fact, it's actually kind of fun. However, for all intents and purposes this game plays just like Space Crusade, just without the nifty miniatures. So we intend to ship this cheap little tart of a game back to eBay and stick with Space Crusade when we feel the need for adolescent Sci-Fi blood-letting.