On a recent road trip, I enjoyed one of my favorite Palm games: SolarWars. The object of SolarWars is to make money by buying and selling cargo while warping around the solar system. (You might have heard of SolarWars in Soft Reset #6.) You have 60 days (that's 60 different visits to planets) to make as much money as you can.

I was very proud of myself when I achieved my highest SolarWars score yet: $442 million. I retired a millionaire! Although $442 million is a decent score, the highest recorded score on the internet I found was $4,355,154,944 near the bottom of this PalmGear page. SolarWar's documentation points to http://cronus.cnicinc.com/solarwars for a high score list. However, that site is no longer available. I searched for that address on Archive.org's Wayback Machine and found this page from April 2003 with 75 scores (all of which are higher than mine).

Players can achieve a higher score by examining the SolarWars Cargo Chart. I made an overhead transparency of this chart so that my fifth graders could refer to it when buying and selling cargo. Also, be sure to read the documentation in the Readme.htm file that is included when you download SolarWars. It gives valuable game play information and offers this strategy:

Diversify your investments. Start by visiting Earth and borrowing the maximum amount you can. Buy water, food, meds, and weapons on Mars and Earth, and sell them on Saturn, Neptune, and Pluto. Buy ore and dilithum on Saturn, Neptune, and Pluto and sell on Earth, Mars, and Jupiter.

Labels: economics, games, palm