Stationfall

I came to Stationfall cautiously. The idea of a more serious Nemesis was appealing, but the lavish production arrives with manuals intimidating enough to make you pause before opening the box. The launch manual suggests learning three pages of basics, playing a game, then coming back for more; in practice, reading alone does not make the game legible. After three or four passes and a healthy amount of BGG assistance, the beast can be tamed, but this is not the sort of game I would casually put on the table after a tired day at work. Rulebook grade: needs attention.

The setting is a space station heading for disaster, made less peaceful by the presence of a top-secret government superweapon. Every player has a hidden identity, while PCs and NPCs share the board. Each round, you place influence tokens on characters and activate one of them. You may be covering your tracks. You may be advancing your agenda. Or you may simply be arranging for a suspicious person to occupy exactly the wrong room at exactly the right time.

That is the clever bit. Only 12 to 14 of the 28 characters appear in a given game, yet their conflicting objectives reliably generate friction, grudges and karate. Bribe tokens and kompromats let you use a character out of turn, squeezing through a difficult action that the usual two actions of an activation would not manage alone. You will muddy the water, blackmail somebody, and watch an apparently irrelevant NPC spoil everyone’s plan rather beautifully. This is Stationfall with its pulse up.

Then the Eklund family starts modelling reality with rules. Subcases and exceptions arrive; they will look alarming, and early games will almost certainly get parts of them wrong. Oddly, this feels like a game in which rules have been removed in the name of user-friendliness. There is a first time for everything. The deluxe miniatures are well made, but they do no favours when they make it harder to tell who is who at a glance.

Stationfall shines when its characters, motives and dirty interventions begin tangling around one another. It demands preparation and a tolerance for confusion, but a group willing to absorb that gets space-station chaos with real teeth.