Far Space

You are part of a corporate-financed United Nations mission near Mars base Atlas One, a mixture of civilian researchers and transport crew.  The mission was to study a spaceship found beneath the surface of Mars, the very first find of alien technology.  When unknown alien forces launched a surprise attack, you decide to use the ship as an escape vessel and are attempting to initiate a jump through hyperspace, but the drive has to charge up for 45 minutes.  You will find yourself far from home, trying to make your way toward a better place as you learn the secrets of this strange ship.

You will play through three events to get to relative safety.  Each event has a specific deck of cards for each station on the ship with different actions that crew members can take.  For example, the technician can research the ship’s systems at the engineering station while the captain can run sensors on the bridge.  During the events, you also play your own characters and must communicate to succeed.  Actions taken by the characters and the resolution of events affect the resources of the ship as a whole, and while the characters have different priorities, everyone's survival is at stake.

This game is a Live Action Roleplay scenario based around escape-room-inspired problem solving challenges in which the fates of individual characters and the ship as a whole depend on the choices that the players make. It requires the following:

• Rules and sheets printed from the provided PDF
• Cards printed double-sided from the second PDF (sleeves recommended)
• 4 kitchen timers (smartphones with timer apps will do in a pinch)
• 1 laptop or tablet to run a big event timer app
• 4 tables to serve as stations in one very large or four smaller but separate rooms
• 1 facilitator familiar with the rules and 6-8 players

The players will try and survive each event by interacting with a deck of cards at the stations (Bridge, Lab, Engineering, Elseship), making decisions and unlocking new cards with the timers. As they have insufficient time to unlock all cards in an event, they need to puzzle out which path leads them to solve their crises.

The game has been run about ten times during development, each time with different players. This is version 1.6, which I consider to be the final version.