The New Flesh

This supplement adds a solo option to Planet 28 , a sci-fi skirmish wargame.  Solo rules The new rules actually consist of solo and collaborative rules which is a nice change from the usual skirmish game competition. The heart of the solo rules are a one page set of instructions on how the enemy characters will act in battle. This takes the form of a prioritised list of actions and looks straightforward to implement. These kind of programmed flowcharts are increasingly common in boardgames so if you've played any of those then these will feel familiar. Collaborative games get a nice "side quest" type feature. You roll randomly for a secret in-game objective and if you succeed in it you alone get rewards for your warband. It's a fun way to keep play aligned without it becoming multiple players negotiating how to play a faction. Solo campaign The second half of the booklet is taken up with a multi-stage scenario, Escape from Lychester VII about rescuing a governor from...

Mothership is a game of sci-fi horror/survival. It has an old-school element in that it is a collection of rules with an implied background. That background is kind of like Aliens and Dead Space . The rules allow you to create crew members on a ship that is exploring a huge and dangerous universe. Core mechanics The main dice used are d10s are the main mechanism is a d% check as per so many Runequest-inspired games. The other elements such as saves and advantage and disadvantage will probably be familiar to most people through Dungeons and Dragons though. Skills The skills are maybe the most distinctive thing about the system as they are setup in a tree with three tiers where higher-tier skills have prerequisites. Higher-tier skills cost more to buy and offer a bigger percentage towards checks (which seems like a sensible way of dealing with percentile whiff). While a bit involved (and with the naturally debatable choices about whether given skills sit in the right tier...

I loved and was frustrated with Summerland in equal measure and when a second edition was Kickstarted I was excited and immediately backed it. To be honest I didn't read the prospectus too deeply as I would have been happy with any improvement over the original rules. However now in possession of the second edition I feel that the issues I had with the game are clearly not those the author did. The game is set after human civilisation has been wiped out virtual overnight by the strange appearance of a forest over most of the land mass of the globe. It's a situation that reminiscent of sci-fi such as the Southern Reach trilogy or Roadside Picnic. From computer games then we are very much in the territory explored by *The Last of Us*. The biggest issue I have with the game is its split game system. It has one game system for most things in the game, in this case a version of the Open d6 system. It then has a specialised sub-system for handling the thing that is the core o...

Robin Laws, talented games designer though he may be, is the Doctor Frankenstein of game design. Stitching elements of traditional gaming and story games together into a resulting rules system that seems to please enough people to make it worthwhile continuing to produce them but not enough to have people praise them. The Gaean Reach is on the surface is a game I could love: classic sci-fi pulp with a story of revenge; a motley crew of the wronged lining up against a powerful interstellar villain, the head of a powerful criminal organisation. It's basically Guardians of the Galaxy . However it is also a revivification of Laws early games Dying Earth and Gumshoe ; incredibly retaining some of the worst parts of both systems in a worst of both worlds combination. It has Gumshoe's split-skill system and the dual-mode of game operation, it has Dying Earth's random taglines and character package generation. It has you-go, i-go combat and it has a GM who creates scenarios ...

Myriad Song has a great premise with a sci-fi setting inspired by 70s pop culture and a rulebook lavishly illustrated with comic book art. The mysterious Syndics of the Myriad Syndicate have disappeared without warning leaving countless other species that they used to rule over to find their own way. The players take on the role of space adventurers involved in cosmic exploration (in both the sense of mental and real space). The game fiction promises slightly surreal and alien adventure, one comic strip follows the misadventures of musicians who accidentally discover a lost chord in the Xen-Harmonic scale that allows warring alien races access to lost planets. However rather like things like Starblazer Adventures and the Fantasy Flight Star Wars games what follows a bold statement of genre fiction is not a rules system for supporting that genre fiction but instead a ridiculously detailed simulation system that realistically can never return on the investment you put into it. Each...

Vast and Starlit is a nano-game from Epidiah Ravachol and comes on four small full-colour cards that can be folded in half to create the game and its three supplements. The base game is essentially a riff on Blake's 7. The players take the roles of prison escapees and mysterious rogue ship that allows the misfits to run and hide from those who pursue them. Each player takes a turn to frame a scene and select who is in focus on that scene. Conflict resolution is really simple and involves either selecting a player to tell you the consequences of the action or alternatively having all the other players collaborate on the consequences. There is a clever provocative questions system for creating alien encounters and the three supplements have detailed sub-systems for love and conflict, travel and technology. These use a twist on the core system of player-driven consequences, introducing tracks and a system of "achieve this before this to succeed". The only thing tha...

This new indie is a small but beautiful book illustrated with colour photographs from NASA's missions to Mars. The game is a bit unusual, designed for two players. One of the player takes the role of someone sent to resolve the problems at the Mars Colony and the other effectively seems to play the GM. One thing I found interesting about the book is that this would have been a seen as a scenario once. The addition of a specific rules system for the scenario doesn't really change that either.

I bought this one by mistake, thinking it was the main rulebook. It's actually a collection of articles and expansion rules that are the result of a writing competition. It's nicely presented but that's all I can say about it for now.

It's a hefty slab of book that came from Amazon, however like Dark Heresy it seems to be fairly comprehensive. If you've suffered sticker shock from the price then it is worth noting that it seems to be the lavish production values that We've given character and ship generation a go and had a tremendous amount of fun. It's a whole different scale to Dark Heresy, the PCs are very much among the Imperial Elite, able to travel freely, purchase planets and generally have a good time. One thing I think is immediately important is that you have to create some reasoning during character generation as to why the characters have not stopped and are just enjoying the fruits of their endeavours.

This book is so big you could kill someone with it. It's actually so big that its daunting to read it. What I have seen so far is that it is very similar to Spirit of the Century , with collective character generation and Stunts hanging off Skills. SotC was a much smaller book so where is this massive bulk coming from? The reproduced art from the Starblazer comics is very nostalgic though.