A long time away yet, in a galaxy not so very distant... An evil, militant empire rose up to conquer the known universe. This empire subjugated and enslaved all the other races and eventually ruled UN-opposed, and its people; the Umans (Their actually called the Humans, but seeing as none of the other civilised races have an "H" in their alphabets, the word Umans stuck!) ruled like gods.

A few years ago however, everything came crashing down. The Uman Empire destroyed itself in a massive civil war and the galactic economy collapsed. The exact reason for this civil war has been much debated of late. The initial theories however regarding Politics.., Religion.., the size of each others private parts were eventually knocked aside as a group of very highly paid historians (who actually do nothing all day but play computer games), finally discovered what they claimed was the real reason..

The fans of two rival football teams (the identities of which have been lost for ever!) decided to once and for all settle the issue of which team was the better! The holy crusade they carried out against each other however blew out of all proportion and soon the entire race had killed itself off! Thus new Dark Age has fallen upon the galaxy! Well... We always knew that Umanity was quite mad!

When the Galactic Economy collapsed as a result, things started to get rather serious! None of the Umans slave races had their own spaceships and hence were unable to trade with each other. It became so serious that people were no longer able to buy their Home Delivered Pizza's for under a million credits at a time (and that was back in the days when a million credits was a lot of money!). Most of the races died out from the shock of it! The few that survived (Those being the one's who actually had Pizza making factories!) managed to salvage the wrecks of a few Uman starships and commence trying to rebuild a semblance of a new galactic empire, where pizza's would once again be freely available to all!

Unfortunately these few races that have managed to pull themselves back from the brink have decided that they will never again be subjugated by one another, so its starting to look like yet another of those big war things is about to happen again! This is the background to the game, and where you step in. As the duly self imposed dictator of your people you must guide them into the new dawn.

You (or at least your underlings, under your guidance) must study the old Uman technology and build up your own fleets and industries quickly, so that you can conquer and oppress your neighbours (ahem, I mean protect the interests of your peoples prosperity!). There is of course a much more important reason for conquering your neighbouring worlds.

Always before your people had been provided for by the Umans. Now you have too large a population to feed and if you don't expand, your people are going to starve and die out in another five or so years. The plan is to starve your neighbours, so that you can use their food to feed your own people. Another solution of course, if you don't like that one, may be to execute half your population, so that you live that bit longer. Your advisors however have done what advisers usually do and advised you against that plan of action.

Unfortunately (as usually happens in the strange and sometimes bazaar world of postal gaming), there are several other races out there, who have the exact same goals as yourself (for surprisingly enough similar reasons as well!). So it goes without saying that your going to have wipe them all out in a war of extreme prejudice in order to achieve your own goals! Of course you can pretend to be working together and all that for a while, taking advantage of each other, but if there's one thing the Umans have taught you well, that is that prosperity and security only comes at the expense of everyone else's utter annihilation.

Sunworlds is an entry level Sci-Fi Empire Building wargame. The simple rules are augmented by funny descriptions, farcical player races and really silly locations! Under all this however is a surprisingly difficult wargame, where you have to build up your own technology, colonise and industrialise different types of planets and invade each other with excessively large armies, most of who will die in the first few minutes!

The starmaps are small, and crowded with other players, meaning that you should be bumping into each other in the first few turns. There's no time to sit around in indecision. You must act quickly, keep up with the arms race and aggressively smash your opponents or be rapidly swept away.

Sunworlds costs £5.00 for a start up and £2.00 for further turns!