Star Fleet Battles Designer's Edition, First Printing

At Origins 1979, we released the Pocket Edition of Star Fleet Battles and it sold out by the fall. We decided to capitalize on success by expanding it into a boxed game released in November 1979. (Back then, pocket games were a new thing and were just not taken as seriously as boxed games.) To save time and work, we just took the rulebook of the pocket game and added pages to the end of it, expanding it from 28 pages to 44 (and effectively just moving the staples from page 14 to page 22). Back then, new SFB rules just got the next number in one big sequence, so you will find weapons rules in two places, scenarios in two places, and ship descriptions in two places. The game was exploding (in more ways than one) and we just kept tacking things onto the end of it. These days, people would expect us to sell a "conversion kit" to bring the pocket edition up to a boxed edition standard, but back then nobody even asked for that. Everyone was happy to (in effect) buy the pocket edition again.