Wikipedia
Triplanetary was a science fiction board wargame published by Game Designers' Workshop in 1973. It was a simulation of space combat within the solar system in the early 21st Century. The game was designed by Marc W. Miller and John Harshman as part of a series to be named "The Stars! The Stars!". A second edition of the game was issued in 1981. In 1989, Steve Jackson acquired the rights to the game, with ambitions to release a new version of the game in 1991. Although a draft version was created, a new edition was never released.
The game consisted of a 16-page book of rules (with four additional pages of errata and clarification); a hex map of the inner solar system; a clear acetate overlay for the map, a grease pencil, a set of cardboard counters representing the various spaceships, and a 6-sided die. (The replacement game parts sold for US$6.80 in 1973.) The game scenarios typically allowed for two players, although some allowed for more players.
The map includes the Sun, Mercury, Venus, Earth and its Moon, Mars, part of the Asteroid belt, and Jupiter, along with the four largest Jovian moons. There were also hexes for two of the largest asteroids, and for a secret asteroid base. The map scale is 9.3 million miles across, so that the placement of the moons is entirely unrealistic; they were situated primarily for game play purposes and not for accuracy.
Triplanetary is a science fiction novel and space opera by E. E. Smith. It was first serialized in the magazine Amazing Stories in 1934. After the original four novels of the Lensman series were published, Smith expanded and reworked Triplanetary into the first of two prequels for the series. The expanded Triplanetary was published in book form in 1948 by Fantasy Press. The second prequel, First Lensman, was a new original novel published in 1950 by Fantasy Press.
The novel covers several episodes in an eons-long human breeding project by the super-intelligences of the Arisians. This alien race is breeding two genetic lines to become the ultimate weapon in Arisia's cosmic war with their arch-enemies, the Eddorians. The initial chapters cover the Kinnison genetic line during the fall of Atlantis and Nero's reign in Rome. These tales were inserted into the novel following the serialized release, along with chapters covering members of the Kinnison line in World Wars One, Two, and Three.
The final chapter of Triplanetary tells of the discovery of the inertialess drive that allows faster-than-light travel. Patrolman Conway Costigan and his friends engage in a space battle with Gray Roger the pirate gangster. This conflict is complicated by the arrival of the technologically superior, extra-Solar, amphibian-like Nevians, resulting in the first interstellar war involving humans. In this story Virgil Samms and Roderick Kinnison, important members of the two breeding lines, are introduced.