Ha, same! As teenagers me and my friends got into it and we'd play by sneakernet. Every day at school we'd exchange floppies with that day's turn. It sounds insanely slow but turns in Stars! could easily take an hour to prepare one the game got going because of all the micromanagement required to handle a large empire. So it fitted OK around homework and dinner.

I played a lot of it back in the day... makes me nostalgic to play again. But this emulator requires Intel and I have ARM Macs.

Probably these days it wouldn't be hard to vibe up a modern equivalent especially with the MCP the author talks about.