Dark Stars is played on both the Interstellar and the Interplanetary level so as to place the full range of space exploration and conflict possibilities in the hands of the players. At the time we did Dark Stars, I played a lot of board games, but almost none of them SF because they were so bad. They routinely ignored pretty much everything having to do with astronomy, physics, and mathematics, and since my background is technical I found that hard to swallow. The main problem with just about every science fiction game I ran across was too much fiction and not enough science. We put a lot of hard science into the system's design, simplified as much as possible to be playable, to try to put some of the science back in, rather than having it just fiction. —description from the designer