Xia: Legends of a Drift System

Xia: Legends of a Drift System has the nerve to be a sandbox roll-and-move game, and somehow gets away with it. It lets me make my own little space story: trade, explore, or load up on missiles and see who is brave enough to drift past. A session can deal out the sort of randomness that will put some people off completely, but at its best the universe feels gloriously uninterested in whether I had a sensible plan.

At its heart, it is free movement through a space sandbox, with dice deciding how far a ship can travel and each turn offering a choice between exploration, trading, and combat. There is none of the reassuring order of a carefully groomed Euro; I can do almost anything I please, provided I accept that the game may occasionally laugh first.

The other players are not scenery in this galactic trip. Once ships start carrying missiles, they become problems, and the fighting has a proper point to it. At three players, though, the map felt a little too large for the amount of cannon fire we wanted; four or five would presumably bring the interaction to life, while also increasing the already noticeable downtime.

This is not for anyone who needs a game to treat them fairly, or to move without pauses. It is for the player who wants to leave the table with a story about their ship, one dreadful roll, and a friend they should have avoided. For me, this scruffy trip through space remains a very pleasant one, and I would happily go again.

Updated session

The later play, using everything including Embers, did not change my view of the sandbox feeling: very few games realise it this well. It did confirm my concern about pacing. Even at three players, space left more empty room than we wanted for shooting, and I am not sure I could bear the added downtime at four or five. An impulse system would make the whole affair move more briskly.