Stationfall

When life tends to drag, you may feel the mundanity of the routine. Things get forgotten, days go by without significance, and drowsiness becomes the new norm. But when the siren rings throughout your space station warning of the eminent violent reentry into Earth's atmosphere, it's time to start reorganizing your priorities. With approximately 15 minutes until fiery doom, you're gonna have to really hustle if you want to get things done. Oh, wait... someone activated the self-destruct sequence. Make that 4 minutes. Stationfall is many things. Sandbox? Check. Hidden objectives? Check. Way too little time to get done everything that needs to be done? Absolutely. A sort of a madcap Nemesis (without the overt horror, just the existential kind) with 1000 moving parts. But perhaps I should just break it down a bit more. In Stationfall, you play as one of a motley of characters aboard a falling space station (hence the title). At the beginning of the game, you'll be handed a number of secret identity cards from among the cast of characters (the number of which depends on your player count). You'll choose one of these characters as your initial player character. The others will be bonus characters; either friends or rivals who you will want to save or eliminate at some point in the game. Each character has a variety of different things they can do as well as ways they might change the game. Legal, for instance, makes it so no one can get on most of the escape pods without a Non-Disclosure Agreement (we gotta keep a lid on this thing). Each character also has a litany of objectives they're trying to accomplish, which you will now be attempting to do, depending on whom you've chosen. It only gets more interesting from there though. Because your identity is a secret, you're allowed to influence and control a multitude of the characters (called your conspirators). You can activate almost any character, depending only on your influence cubes and whether someone else has Revealed as a character. In fact, it's entirely possible to get your objectives done without having activated your player character once (although it's a lofty task). Once you've activated a character, you can do 1-2 actions with them, depending on if they're exhausted or not (if they've already been activated). Actions come in many forms, including movement, throwing, attacking, copying data, as well as the myriad station actions that come from being in certain rooms of the station. Largely, if you can think it, there's probably SOME way to get it done. That is, as long as no one gets in the way. There's the rub. Since everyone has secret objectives, everyone's attempting to do something different. Most likely, whatever they're trying to do is going to get in the way of what you're trying to do. If it's getting too annoying you can always attempt to take out whatever character they're using, just try not to get caught on camera. Within all of this chaos, each game ends up in a nail-biting race to get as much done as possible, with a few ways to end the game a bit early as well (for those who really want to see their opponents suffer). Or perhaps you've given up on doing things for yourself and it's just time to make sure no one else gets anything done for themselves. For me, this game absolutely sings. It's a messy, discordant tune, but it's one I'm a huge fan of. The amount of tension, humor, and complete zaniness resonates with me on a level I wasn't aware a board game could produce. But there are some caveats. While the actual turn structure is fairly simple, the amount of things you can do with actions, the huge changes each character brings with them, and the variety of things going on in the ship itself bring a ton of overhead both rules-wise and action-wise. While I don't believe the game itself would work without this variety, the phrase but what do I actually DO comes up quite often. However, in spite of this, I would completely recommend everyone try it. This is one news-friendly disaster that I'm happy to run around in again and again.