Saturday 9 March 2019

Blast - Off

Into Space with Waddington’s BLAST-OFF!  Described as “The Game of Modern Space Exploration and Technology for 1 to 4 Players. It also states in the introduction “It is not necessary to understand the rules for all three stages at the start” A friend of mine gave me Blast - Off for Christmas and I have been trying to fathom out how to play it since then. Blast Off comes with some rather superb dials to measure Fuel, Orbit and planets visited. The playing pieces are various coloured Space Capsules and Satellite docking stations. You first have to get your Satellite docking stations into orbit then have to get the Capsule docked into your Satellite. Next step is to land on the moon and then head off around the solar system ending up at Pluto. First to make it there is the winner. Along the way you could run out of fuel and have to return to earth or even the moon to re-fuel.
Blast - Off was released at a time of the Apollo 11 moon landing and the late 60s were a peak time for Space related toys and games (Major Matt Mason, Project Sword, Triangs SpaceX, Zeriods and even Action Man who had a Mercury Capsule) I was lucky enough to have Zeroids (here is my last one) and The Action Man Astronaut and Capsule, both long gone. Clarks shoes even got in on the space thing by creating their Wayfinder Moonshot Shoes (The Sole was a silver liner surface, that did not stay silver for long) also supplied for your space age fun with the shoes was a cardboard space/moon background that came with transfers and space capsule which with the aid of a magnet you could move around on your space background. At the time I thought it was all fantastic……I still do.


A very young me looking slightly confused at my Action Man Mercury Space Capsule.
(Think the shoes had seen better days) BTW I still have that slightly confused look, normally when I am trying to write some music.

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