Heh. I have wanted to do this for just over
thirty years now, ever since the first 4X game I ever played, a board game called "Stellar Conquest" from an Austin, Texas based company called Metagaming Concepts (I
think that they
may have eventually merged with Steve Jackson Games).
Stellar Conquests was basically the pure 4X portion of GalCiv, obviously without AI diplomacy, etc., but also without interstellar commerce. Explore star systems, find new planets, colonize, research new technologies, build new ships, etc., while the other human players, starting from the other corners of the map board, were doing the same. Great game.
Anyway, I always wanted to play it on a board made from a real star map (SC did use a lot or real star names, but they were scattered around the map at random). Of course, it was a bit harder to find out that sort of information back in the 1970s, when all knowledge was
not as close as the nearest keyboard (in my case, an Underwood manual typewriter).
