I’ve played this two years running now at GoPlay NW, and I’m super-excited to see it come to Kickstarter. One of the things that is clever about it is tying rule abstractions to “in fiction” justifications that support the “this is a high tech future, not just a western with blasters” feel. For example it does a sorta-Blades like thing with equipment, where your ship has a pool of supply points, that in fiction are matter blocks you feed into your 3D printer, so whenever you EVA you just say “hmm… I’d like to have this specialized piece of equipment, so I’ll just print that out” and you deduct the cost from your supply pool in the moment. Or everybody has a multitool that is a combo weapon, handheld tractor beam, shield projecter, and runcible spoon, and your skills represent how good you are at using your multitool in a particular fashion.

One thing I haven’t got to experience in the GPNW is all the stuff around sector / alien /ship / etc generation, e.g. all the sandboxy stuff. Looking through the pre-genned stuff Christoph always hands out makes me suspect there is a lot of juice there though. I love the super bio-sciencey way that the various species you can play are described, full of evocative material for making your guy be more than just a person with a funny forehead.