>I do not recommend exposing people to it raw, though. You have to
>gateway drug them into it, and the way it was done to me (by fellow
>forum dweller Croaker, in fact) was to start with Federation
>Commander, which uses a stripped-down and in many ways more
>elegant and cinematic ruleset and has nice friendly cards depicting
>your starship you can mark all over with dry-erase markers and other
>things to make play more friendly. If a person ends up taking to it,
>they often come to wish for more granular control over things like
>phaser fire, boarding parties, shield facing, etc etc. and that's when
>you smile and drop a copy of the SFB rules on the table.
>
Whilst I can quote SFB rules nearly verbatim (interactions interactions interactions dammit) I actually play FC; mostly because it's actually possible to complete a game in an evening without resorting to flying the smallest possible ships or using the cutdown tournament rules.

S.