Okay I managed to get a game in! I used some old papercraft terrain and minis I made to play Space Station Zero.
My crew, consisting of a leader, a gunner, a rookie, and a custom-built medic, entered through the airlock and started heading into the derelict ship.
Their trackers indicated two points of interest close by - one in a large operations bay around the corner, and one in the hallway ahead. The team split up, with two crew heading towards each.
As soon as the rookie tapped in the pirate codes to unlock the stasis vault, a feeble alarm sounded, and some old, rustbucket sentry robots rose up from panels in the floor. The crew could hear one group of robots arriving far away, but the other group appeared between them and the airlock!
The medic moved forward and took a shot with her rifle. It was a solid hit, but it mostly just pinged off of the robot's metal exterior. The crew realized that none of their weapons would be able to take one of these sentries down – it was just going to be a race to the exit.
The heavy gunner stepped forward while the leader looted the other stasis vault, firing on the robots but his shots merely pinging off their armor.
As the heavy gunner moved in to draw the robots' fire, the remaining crew ran, skirting around the robots which were hammering the gunner's armor with their shots. Luckily, the robots were old and malfunctioning, so they failed to deal any damage to the gunner.
Having kited their way around the robots, the crew managed to duck back into their ship and take off, just as the other group of robots arrived to back up the first.
Looking at the haul of loot, they were dismayed to find that one of the stasis pods they'd dragged back to the ship was, essentially, worthless. The other was a small-value pod worth maybe fifteen credits back at the station.
"All in a day's work," said the captain, but he knew they'd barely covered the cost of ammo. Next time they may not be so lucky.
Thoughts on the system!
The setup and theme are fun. The "stalk through the corridors and roll to see if they show up" is cool. Really liked the "don't kill everything, just try to escape with the loot" vibe.
The "roll under on d10" mechanic works fine, but when most stats are in the 2-4 range, and even the "spotlight" stat is a 6 or so, that means a heck of a lot of failed rolls. I might try house-ruling it to be "roll under or equal on d10", just so stuff happens more. (But since the enemy shot at my crew far more than we shot at them, that might really ramp up the difficulty...)
One thing about the "roll under on d10 with most stats at 2-3" thing is that it makes it really unlikely that anyone will try to climb for different elevations if they don't need to, since they have to roll a 1 or maybe a 2 on d10 or else they fall, wasting an action and taking damage that ignores armor if they're trying to climb more than 2". And since you'd almost certainly have to climb twice if you climb once (because you need to get back out after climbing), then chances are very good you'll fall at least once.
Ballistic plate seemed very, very powerful. I'd invested in a laser rifle for my medic, and I hit one of the robots with the 2d8 hit, rolling a 12 – a pretty good hit! But rolling their 1d8+4, they blocked 9 of that, so I only did 3 points. I'd have to hit that robot seven more times at that rate to take it out, which would have cost me about 20CR worth of ammo. I only escaped with 15CR so taking down even ONE of those robots would have meant the entire mission was a net loss. And there were six of them.
Worse, my gunner character, with his scrap rifle, could only do 2d4 damage, but the robots would block 1d8+4 of that, so the absolute most damage I could do would be 9-5 = 3, and that's if we both rolled perfectly high and low. When they have 20 hit points, and it costs 2CR per attack, there's no use in even attacking. For him to take out a robot, again, rolling perfectly, it would have cost a minimum of 14CR. (And again, I only escaped with 15CR!)
The flip side, of course, is that my gunner could walk around with near impunity despite being shot at 6-8 times per round. The robots only did 1d8 with their lasers, so when I block 1d8+4 of that, and they miss 50% of the time, it's not surprising that they never did manage to pierce his ballistic plate. It made for a nice cinematic scene – the gunner holding off this barrage of enemies as their bolts ping off his plate, him firing back desperately but not taking any of them out, while the rest of the crew crept around trying to get to the airlock– but in terms of gameplay, it kinda felt like nothing was happening.
But maybe all that's intentional for the robots – maybe they're intended to be these indestructible, menacing things that you just have to outmaneuver. It will be interesting to try it out with one of the enemies that doesn't have armor and see if/how it feels different.
Anyway the game rules themselves seemed easy and streamlined, and the game went super quickly, taking only about half an hour from setup to conclusion. Loved that aspect of it – I can play a salvage operation pretty fast with very little in terms of ramping up or maintenance, which means it'll get to the table more often.
Overall, a cool little game! I'm a little concerned about the armor and weapon balance and the difficulty of rolls making a lot of nothing happen, but I think the jury's still out on that until I get it to the table a few more times. But it was fun to read through, try out, and get played at the table.
Nice little cozy game. I decided to give up once I hit wave 110 and had all gold balls, 2860 health, and 2320 max shield. Still had a few shields that weren't at full 20, but it wasn't making that much of a difference.
I do recommend revisiting the layout and UI. The coins on the left and the store descriptions on the right get cut off, and all the text is uncomfortably small, especially the health and armor readout.
I'd also strongly recommend a way to skip animations, say with a tap of the space bar, or a way to accelerate the animations. Once you get 15 balls going, it becomes a bit of a slog to wait for things.
There also seems to be a bug when you complete the game and go into endless mode – the registration of where the panels on the wheel are get offset (I think it's because the wheel is set to turning when you win), and you have to re-set the panels in the wheel manually to get them back into place.
Anyway, clever little design. Enjoyed it.
