Stationfall

I approached Stationfall with reservations. The idea of a “serious Nemesis” intrigued me, but the designer’s name, the huge manuals, and the sight of a “Massive FAQ” on BGG were enough red flags to put me on guard. The Kickstarter production impressed me, yet I needed three or four readings of the rules and plenty of help from BGG before I started feeling like I understood the beast. The launch manual essentially tells you, “learn three pages of basics and play,” but for me that is impossible: the rules read as if they were written by a ChatGPT left alone on Quora and then fed magic mushrooms through its chips. This is not a game I would easily bring to the table on a tired Friday night.

On the space station, something has gone very wrong, and in 12-14 minutes everything will end badly. In the panic, players do not simply control one obvious hero: everyone’s identity is secret, and PCs and NPCs coexist on the table. Each round, we place influence tokens on characters and choose one to activate, either to muddy the waters or to advance our own agenda. Some will try to escape, others will remember old scores, and the presence of a secret government superweapon does not make anything calmer.

This is where Stationfall truly shines. Although a game features 12-14 of its 28 characters, its web of conflicting objectives works so well that it almost always produces complexes and karate. Bribe tokens and kompromats—blackmail material—let you move a character out of turn and pull off a difficult action that does not fit within the two actions of a normal activation. It is an extremely clever system of interaction, misdirection, and suspicious favours, and I would honestly like to see other games borrow it.

On top of those solid foundations, though, the Eklund family comes in to model reality with sub-cases and exceptions. Mistakes will happen in early plays; the world will not end because of that, but the learning process remains intimidating. The irony is that this seems to be the case where they have removed rules to make it more user-friendly—yes, there is a first time for everything. And the deluxe miniatures, however high-quality they are, make it harder to immediately tell who is who. Stationfall has a core worth the effort: provided your group accepts that, before the blackmail and betrayals begin, it first has to survive the rulebook.