In response to a lamentation from a correspondent tasking “... why is it that when we get married our wives have an instant disdain for SFB?” we are in receipt of a response:

Speaking as one of those wives, it just has too many rules. The action (which is pretty slow to start with) always gets interrupted so we can look up the latest wrinkle in Wild Weasels or dragging someone with tractors. And don't even talk about midturn speed changes--it's not clear to me that the *designers* know how they work. Somewhere under the fat is a reasonably interesting duelling game, but it's beyond me to prune it out.

I hate losing a game because I forgot one or more rules.

Furthermore, if you play scenarios with more than 1-2 ships on a side it's my experience that the game goes on long past the point where the players are not really enjoying it anymore. I like long games well enough (though not as well as I did when I was younger) but not if they become a grind. I've noticed that if a game was fun for 4 hours and then tedious for the next 4, leading to grumpy and irritable players at the end, the male players seem to remember it reasonably fondly, whereas the female players think it was a failure.

We still have our SFB stuff. My husband looked at it with some interest recently, then read the rules discussions on rgf.board and said "hm, maybe not." We used to play quite a lot of it, but we were always tinkering trying to get it down to a playable game, and never really succeeded. I do like a good one-on-one or two-on-one fight, though, on the rare occasion we can find sufficiently well balanced ships. I had one further thought. Our most successful SFB "campaign" (a rotating set of scenarios such as convoy defense, base defense, meeting of wide patrols, etc.) had a relatively limited number of ships so that I could learn them in detail, and we*named* them. For players who are not used to reading military stuff, the welter of acronyms and meaningless abbreviations is rather offputting. I have trouble with the difference between a D7C and a D7S; I learnt the ships as "Jackal" and "Shrike" and that helped a good deal.