It’s very easy to pick up and play. Like earlier versions of D&D, starting characters might be seen as a little ‘under-powered’ but IMHO this is only an issue if you immediately throw them into situations in which they have little chance of making any headway. There are enough published adventures that could be used to start building up the characters, and the boxed game includes a few mini adventures that can be used for introductory play. Alternatively you could simply assign the players a skillset/‘starting level’ kind of thing which means that initial characters are a bit more fleshed out in terms of their capabilities. If you want to more space-based games, you’d need to get Knighthawks - although characters that want to be active space farers also need to be pretty experienced (but this could be tweaked to one’s own liking).
The game is also sandboxy. The Frontier is made up of established worlds with routes in space linking them together, and these are described to a certain extent, but there’s a lot of room for a referee to do their own thing and play around with the setting. Although my brother and I ran various published adventures, we also created our own and didn’t then end up breaking the system or the setting.
Not long before TSR’s support for Star Frontiers ended, a kind of updated rules source book called Zebulon’s Guide to Frontier Space - a.k.a. Zeb’s Guide - was published. It was supposed to be a 2-part thing, but the second part never saw the light of day. Zeb’s Guide added new playable races, new equipment and similar things, but also a new resolution system for resolving actions such as combat, skill checks etc. However, you could ignore that system and still use the content within the guide. Zeb’s Guide isn’t universally popular within Star Frontiers fandom but it is still largely canon because it contains various things that are useable to players playing the original version of the rpg.
Frontier Explorer takes both the original rules and Zeb’s Guide into account, as well as other canon material published in Dragon and other resources.
