THE OMEGA WAR is a two-player game of strategic warfare for control of North America in the 25th century. One player (the Union Player) takes the role of the High Commissioner for North America and controls the forces of the World Union. The other player (the Rebel Player) takes the role of the Directorate of the secret Omega Organization and controls the native forces opposing the World Union. The players alternately raise new forces (represented by the playing pieces) and maneuver them across a map of North America, using them to attack the other player's forces and to achieve their strategic objectives.
Introduction
Armageddon ....2121.... the year the missiles fell. For three-quarters of a century man had held the atomic genie in check. Then the long-dreaded nightmare happened. The nations of Europe and North America went to war .. . and took the atom with them. Over a 10-day period that spring some 11,000 warheads exploded over the northern hemisphere, turning most of the world’s great cities into radioactive slag and filling the atmosphere with invisible death. When the great burning was over, the stunned survivors crawled out of their shelters to find a world unlike any they had known. North America, Europe, Japan, North Africa, the Middle East, the Soviet Union and northern China were devastated. The world economy was in ruins. Food, fuel and manufactured goods were in short supply. Exposure to the fallout—laden air outside the shelters was possible for only brief periods each day. Communications were a shambles.
As the governments of those nations still intact struggled to restore order, the conviction grew that such wholesale destruction must never happen again. At the Rio Conference of 2122, delegates from 96 different nations penned their signatures to the charter of the World Union, an international organization designed to regulate conflict among nations. The Union, according to its charter, had the sole right to possess nuclear weapons of any kind, but could only use such weapons to keep anyone else from developing a nuclear capability. As its first official act, the Grand Assembly of the World Union voted to assume the administration of the so-called “devastated zone” of North America, Europe and the Soviet Union until such time as the native populace was capable of self-determination. Almost three hundred years later, the World Union retained its trusteeship. Having grown fat from the exploitation of American and Russian agricultural and mineral resources, the Union and its member nations were reluctant to relinquish their hold. Within the boundaries of what had formerly been Canada, Mexico and the United States, almost a score of World Union plantations and cities housed three million foreign bureaucrats and soldiers and twelve million native workers whose status was little better than that of Slaves. Outside the Union’s domed settlements hostile “gangs” of American “freemen,” loosely joined into “clans”,controlled most of the countryside with the tacit approval of the Union. Nomad hordes roamed the Great Plains, attacking or trading with Union work parties, according to their mood. Within the wastelands where the continent's cities once stood, bands of savage mutants, descendents of those who never left the radiated areas, made their homes. Slaves and clansmen, nomads and mutants ... each group distrusted the other. By constantly playing on this distrust, the Union had always kept the populace at each other's throats. Never had the Americans been able to show a united front that would establish their fitness for self-rule. In the role of international policeman, the Union kept a garrison of heavily-armed troops supported by air fleets in North America to keep the natives in line. In troubled times, this force was supplemented by native auxiliaries who willingly fought their countrymen in exchange for Union gold. It had been this way for 300 years. It seemed that it would Stay this way for 300 more.
Then came Omega. At first it was just a symbol . . . something scrawled over Union proclamations. The last letter of the Greek alphabet meant nothing to most natives when it first appeared. But, by the winter of 2419, its meaning was clear. Omega... an ending. An ending to foreign exploitation. An ending to slavery in the Union mines, factories and plantations. An ending to the phony trusteeship that kept America in thrall. Throughout the winter and spring... in the tents of the Dakotan Nomads staked on the high plains ... deep within the bowels of the clanwarrens under the Alleghenies... in the cratered mutant strongholds of Nosia ... inside the slave pens of Nu Denver ... Omega was debated. The first slave revolt broke out on July 4th. The first clan rising took place a week later. The Omega War had begun.