It doesn’t have the broad sweep of knowledge that a game like Civilization imparts to the player, instead being fearsomely specialised in its particular subject area, but I guarantee you that when you get done playing a game of BARIS you will have a better grasp of how the R&D of new spacecraft worked during the space race than 99% of the population of planet Earth, being as it is woven into the very fabric of the game itself.īARIS casts you as the director of either the US or Soviet space programs.

Not Liftoff, though, In Liftoff the rules and gameplay fit the theme – the technological duel for the stars between the USA and the Soviet Union during the late 50s and 60s – and it very definitely shows in BARIS.Īs a result I would probably nominate BARIS as one of the most educational video games in existence. A lot of boardgames come up with a core gameplay mechanic and then find a theme to fit to it, and this can end up producing a completely nonsensical disconnect as with Dominion. This means that BARIS is somewhat more abstracted than you might expect a computer game to be, but at the same time given the game’s roots it’s quite astonishing just how much detail they did manage to cram in here. It’s a computer adaptation of a boardgame called Liftoff!, and since the designer of the boardgame was in charge of the computer version it hews pretty closely to the boardgame rules. Bom bom bom bom bom-BOM-bom bom bom bom-BOM-bom-BOM-bom bom bom…īuzz Aldrin’s Race Into Space (or BARIS, as it is affectionately known) is an odd beast.

Race into space for droid