It looks like you can play here
http://asup.washingtonmarshalls.com/index.php

That's pretty much it. Diplomacy with nukes, missle defense systems, economies based on resources and companies to develop them. We played a couple of really good (strictly cold war) games of it where nobody engaged in any combat at all. We didn't even take over neutral territories. It has some great possibilities, but I've never seen a good internet version of it. I'll check that site out, thanks.

This game was a disappointment for me...a neat concept ruined by clunky mechanics, and badly thought-out expansions (*especially* the one with MIRVed weapons and Neutron bombs). The vanilla game was playable if you added a liberal dose of smartass friends and beer, though.

Yeah I think all the expansion packs killed it. We played with neutral armies (It was pretty cool selling nukes to 3rd world dictatorships), and the second resource deck (really sucked playing half deck and finding out that there probably weren't any nuke cards in the deck after you'd spent five billion in development).

I certainly liked the idea that you could send your army anywhere, but you needed to feed them.

A fun idea gone terribly wrong. One of the biggest problems with Supremacy was income. You pretty much had to buy and sell your oil/minerals/etc. in Bear/Bull markets in order to make any real money. In a later edition, they came out with taxation rules where each city in a province gave you so much income. That part actually made land-invasions worthwhile. Otherwise, the only real benefit of taking over territory was to completely occupy another player so that you could build off of their home card, effecitvely doubling your resources. But no one would want any other player to get to do that, so they start propping up the beat-up-ee. But all of that is academic. The end of the game 100% of the time comes down to one guy, on his last legs, launching his nukes at someone else who has either pissed them off at some point, or is completely bored with the game and wants to "shake it up a bit." Then it becomes a nuke fest of everyone shooting their nukes at everyone else and using L-Sats to take them down. Invariably someone will fail the roll for Nuclear Winter, and everyone loses because the world can no longer sustain human life. Naturally, it takes anywhere from 3-6 hours of gameplay to reach this point of the philosophical exercise. That's when someone says, "Who the fuck suggested we play this shitty game?"

Of course, now that you mention Supremacy, I start wondering where my board is, and if the guys would want to play. Thanks a lot.

Ha, that sounds awesome! Lousy game maybe, but awesome concept if you never actually play it. (Which is the point, right?)

Sounds like a modern new age Diplomacy variant.
Like a game someone who admires Diplomacy would try to create.
Finance and nukes?
I have to try it...

I'd echo Emperor Ming's comments - the economics were totally broken, with markets going up and down like a yoyo, and turn order being massively dependent on performance. We got to the point where our house rule was that 3 'units' were required to move the price up or down, rather than 1, jut to bring a bit of stability - otherwise the first player could push the resource all the way up or down the value track...

Ha ha ha! This thread brings back some horrible memories.

Unless you were "selling by proxy" on the market (anyone else remember that headache?), the only other feasible way of making income was one of the expansions allowed overthrowing the neutrals governments, so you'd sell all your nukes to [insert minor nation here], make a ton of money, overthrow them, and get your nukes back. Some of the neutral nations would end up with arsenals larger than some of the players. I remember one game where I saw someone attack a neutral country and the neutral blew up 2/3rds of their country because it had so many nukes.

Ming is right, I can't remember one game of Supremacy I was in that didn't involve a nuclear war at some point. EVERY game ended with it.

That might have been the reason it always came off pretty well for us. We almost never used a nuclear weapon (12 nukes plunged everyone into nuclear winter & everybody losy anyway), but always used the threat of it to good effect. It came off as a kind of model UN situtation for us in which we haggled and traded, generally we used diplomacy before force. Using the threat of an invasion to force the other guy to spend billions in preparation was generally just as good as actually invading. I can see where it would be tedious if every game involved actual mushroom clous on the board.

That's a good house rule Pete. Our house rule was army reserves. You could build an army or navy for full price, then take it off the board until you needed it (it only cost half price until activated & had to be called up inside the superpower's home territories).

Bump

Anybody else play Supemacy?

side note

I just dug out my set of Illuminati cards & taught my 9 year old how to play. We've played four games this week.

Nope but would like to know more about it

Supremacy is a decent hybrid of Monopoly, Diplomacy, and Risk, with nuclear weapons thrown into the mix.

Illuminati is a card game of conspiracy in which you play a shadowy secret organization and take over groups (the International Communist Conspiracy, the goldfish fanciers, Ford Motors) to build an unstoppable power structure.

If anyone finds a decent Internet version of it, id be up for playing just to see what all of the fuss in about.

is there any online version of Illuminati as well?

THe only online version of Supremacy that I can find has a really difficult interface. I played a couple of games but it was really slow. Illuminati doesn't have an online version that I know of. The game is still in print though. You can get it a Steve Jackson Games's website.

Crazy Anglican's hybrid description is dead-on. The money angle did get frustrating at times, so the taxation rule would have been helpful. Also the only expansion we used was the Second Resource Deck, so we kept it relatively simple (although I had wondered how well the Warlords and Pirates expansion worked).

The concept is very good. In fact, the 18 year old son of a long-time wargamming buddy of mine saw the game at my house recently and became so intrigued with the little mushroom clouds that he wants to learn how to play.

The pirates and worlords version was the last expansion I added on. It was great because the pirates and warloard owned most of the resources. You could trade for resources, and build troops and nukes for the neutral countries. It made even a small war with a neutral country an iffy proposal.