Surviving against the odds
There are a multitude of ways to classify boardgames based on their components, their mechanics, their player counts, and so on. One way to classify them, that I may or may not be inventing on the spot right now, is the type of agency that players have. Often the player is attempting to succeed at some goal, such as solving a mystery or defeating an evil creature. They may make the wrong choice or bite off more than they can chew, but the game is driven by their actions and the player is in control of what happens next. On the other hand, there are games that progress on their own schedule. The player must react to the events that happen while trying to either achieve a goal or simply survive until the defined end of the game.
The latter type of games often have a heavy element of luck in order to provide the difficulty and tension, with the player desperately trying to prevent or undo the problems caused by random events. Combined with a theme that is not at all upbeat, this could easily put off a lot of people. It turns out, though, that I seem to enjoy these games, particularly ones where you have to survive on a failing spaceship. The latter isn’t surprising—I’ve always been a fan of sci-fi, and a ship is the ideal setting for restricted escape options. As for why I enjoy this type of game… I’m not exactly sure why I like staring down the barrel of failure, but what I can say is that my exposure to these games started with Tharsis…
Tharsis
Tharsis is a videogame released on Steam and PS4 back in 2016 and later on Switch in 2020. The player controls a team of astronauts who are on their way to Mars when disaster strikes their ship. Systems are failing, fires are spreading, and with no rescue mission possible they need to hold everything together until they reach their destination.
The reviews were actually not all that good, getting 44% from PC Gamer, 4.8/10 from IGN, and 58% on metacritic. Bear in mind that in the videogame world a score of 60-70% is considered a mediocre score and “good” games get scores in the high 80s at a minimum. The main complaint in almost all reviews is that too much of the player’s success or failure hinges on the dice rolls, which is possibly a fair assessment as you can be very unlucky some of the time. A lot of the time. However, that doesn’t mean the player has no influence. A lot of the strategy in the game centers on mitigating the extent to which bad rolls will impact your run, in the knowledge that not every run is necessarily winnable. If this doesn’t click with the player then they may find themself getting frustrated.
As for me… well it turned out I really enjoyed it. I liked the feeling of barely keeping things going, of having to make hard choices and decide which system failures could wait and which needed to be fixed right now. I will admit that it’s too luck-based at times and failing a critical roll can be quite frustrating, but that didn’t stop me wanting to keep coming back for one more try.
But why am I talking about a videogame on a boardgame-focused website? Well Tharsis was my first proper introduction to this type of game. On the boardgame side of things I picked up a few sci-fi survival games over time, like Desolate and Deep Space D-6, and while they were good games in their own right they didn’t scratch the Tharsis itch. There’s rarely a niche that a boardgame or two won’t fill though, and eventually I found Solar Storm and SSO. Both of these are playable solo, so of course I had to jump on them.
Shameless plug: I developed a text adventure style videogame adaptation of Desolate, which you can find on Itch.io!
Solar Storm
I first found out about Solar Storm by Dranda Games shortly before CHILLCON Derby 2019 and then found out they were demoing the game there. Seeing that it might be the game I’d been looking for I couldn’t resist giving it a go. Twice in fact. Both attempts ended in defeat, which was basically what I expected. As soon as I got home from the event I backed their Kickstarter and now have my very own copy.
The story presented in Solar Storm is that you have strayed too close to a star and been the victim of the titular solar storm, which your ship hasn’t taken too kindly to. The rulebook describes the scenario:
You have entered the red zone bringing you within spitting distance of the Sun. The red zone is usually a no-go area, but you had no choice. The risk hasn’t paid off though. The entire ship shakes, warning lights start flashing, and alarms start ringing. Your ship is now caught in a solar storm which has taken the Energy Core offline and keeps damaging other areas of the ship. To make matters worse, the ship is now on a collision course with the Sun itself! You will all need to use what you can find to direct the remaining power to the Energy Core, whilst also making sure the rest of the ship doesn’t take too much damage. Have you got what it takes to bring the systems back online or will you perish in the scorching abyss?
The playing field consists of a 3x3 grid of rooms that are randomly selected, except for the central room which is always the energy core. The goal is to divert power from the other eight rooms to the energy core and then activate the core. The rooms take damage each turn, with each able to take three hits. If any room is destroyed then the game is immediately lost. Luckily the players can repair the rooms. Unluckily the game starts with eight hits randomly allocated between the rooms already.
The game is a delicate balancing act between attempting to achieve the main goal while also patching up the damage that is continuously occurring. Focus too much on powering up the core and you’ll quickly lose due to accumulated damage. Focus too much on repairing damage and you’ll run out of time and fail to escape. To pile on the pressure, the longer the game runs for the more damage is caused each turn. Oh, and did I mention that you can only perform actions on rooms that your meeples are in? And moving uses up actions? This game has no interest in you getting out alive. If you pick up the playmat then the star looming ready to swallow your ship doesn’t exactly help reduce the tension either.
As I mentioned before, my first two games of Solar Storm did not end well for the crew. Luck (or lack thereof) played a part in that, with the second game embodying how harsh the game can be. There were two rooms that would result in a loss if either one took damage and I only had the actions available to repair one of them. I made my choice, drew the next damage card… and of course the card showed the room I didn’t repair. I suspect that this feeling of the game deliberately presenting the worst option to you will be something that keeps coming up, even though there’s no way for it to be literally true. Unless… No, that’s impossible.
One major difference between Solar Storm and Tharsis is in how damage works. In Solar Storm you are at the mercy of the cards you draw. The player doesn’t have any way of mitigating the damage cards other than the repairs they are desperately performing. If you draw a card that happens to destroy a room then the game is over. In Tharsis, on the other hand, the incoming damage is ship-wide so no single room can destroy the ship by individually accumulating too much damage. The incoming damage is also shown to you at the start of your turn and applied at the end, allowing you to directly attempt to resolve it, rather than having to play safe and hope for the best. This does make Solar Storm potentially feel more unfair at times, definitely more brutal, as the player is unable to respond to what is happening until it has already happened.
Overall if you think that victory tastes much sweeter when the game fundamentally wants you to lose then this is probably one for you to check out. At times it feels a little too unfair but I can’t really complain much as that’s pretty much exactly what made me pay attention to it in the first place.
SSO
I found out about SSO, by Man O’ Kent Games, when they started advertising the Kickstarter for some expansions. Always being on the lookout for more solo sci-fi games that just want your team dead, I picked it up along with the expansions that were already out at the time.
SSO has several different modules, referred to as Challenge Decks, that provide a backstory and a set of Challenge and Mission cards based around that story. The core box includes the A.I. Challenge Deck, which reminds me of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Also available as expansions are First Captain, which reminds me of Event Horizon, and Parasites, which may remind you of The Thing (which I somehow have never seen!). Coming soon are the Rage of Montalbano Deluxe Expansion and the Temporal Anomaly Challenge Deck.
SSO, much like Solar Storm, has a playing field that consists of cards representing the rooms of a spaceship. In SSO they’re laid out in a rather more ship-like shape though rather than in a grid. At least, one would assume it’s more ship-like. Who knows, maybe we’ll be driving cubes around in the future; it’s not like there’s air resistance in space.
While Solar Storm has one defined goal to accomplish, SSO requires the players to overcome multiple challenges that are different with each challenge deck. It also has more of a focus on the crew members as distinct people, with the players tracking personal oxygen supply and morale for each as well as the oxygen supply for the ship itself. Some of the challenges specifically target crew members that are too bunched together or too spread out. Importantly, crew members can die, potentially making the game harder with each loss but also saving some precious oxygen. I know it sounds harsh, but saving oxygen can be an important consideration as it’s easy to use up, or lose, but not so easy to generate.
So how is it to play? SSO, as it stands with what you get in the box, was hard for me to get going with. There’s something about the way the rulebook is laid out, the colours used, and the structure of it that just wouldn’t click with me. However, Man O’ Kent Games offer an updated and reformated version of the rules on their site in multiple formats and I found it much easier to use that version. Soon enough I was playing. The updated version of the rules will be included with the Rage of Montalbano expansion.
I actually won my first game of SSO, which I wasn’t expecting. And I only cheated once! To be fair, it was only a small oversight in my reading of the rules and it wouldn’t have affected the outcome. There was definitely an element of beginner’s luck in that win though, as I happened to flip the mission cards in an advantageous order and the challenge cards went fairly easy on me. However, all it takes is a few things to line up badly and suddenly things start to cascade and your resource balancing turns in to playing catchup while putting out the metaphorical (or literal) fires that keep breaking out. Even in that first game there were a few times where things were getting tight and it felt like the balance could tip against me if I drew a couple of wrong cards at the wrong time.
Managing the oxygen levels and morale never felt easy, but I also never felt that the game was being too restrictive. I had no problem overall maintaining morale and keeping a little bit of personal oxygen handy for each crew member, but then a challenge card (or three) and maybe an activated mission card would come along that tipped the whole thing on its head and leave me trying to get back into a good position while trying not to let a mission fail. Location cards being flipped offline (removing their special ability that crew members can use until they’re flipped back again) really makes an impact and was possibly my most dreaded thing. Especially if the Computer Module gets flipped, removing your ability to flip locations on demand. At that point you’re at the mercy of chance to let you flip locations back online and you can potentially only watch in despair as the whole ship starts to go offline. Or the airlock gets flipped just as you need to deal with a solar array issue, or need to bring a crew member back on board. If the cards decide they don’t like you then you’re going to have problems.
Final thoughts
Despite Solar Storm and SSO being superficially very similar, they have several important differences that result in quite a different feel to the two games. As I mentioned previously, SSO has somewhat of a focus on managing resources compared to Solar Storm’s reactive style of gameplay that sees you patching up damage as it occurs to give you time to achieve your goal. There’s also the matter of deck exhaustion. Solar Storm gives the player a deadline—if the Resource deck runs out then you lose the game, making it a race against time to get the power diverted. Meanwhile, SSO changes that deadline into a goal—if the Challenge deck runs out then you have overcome all of the problems and you win the game.
So why do I enjoy them? Outside of the mechanics, I’m a big fan of sci-fi so games about saving a spaceship in trouble definitely appeals to me. Focusing on the mechanics though, obviously there’s the aspect of fighting, and hopefully winning, against the odds. There’s something to be said about winning when the game isn’t making any effort to make your life easy; a difficult victory can be all the sweeter. Finally, an aspect I mentioned earlier is that the events in the game don’t advance on the player’s schedule. Things will keep happening (i.e. the spaceship will keep falling apart) whether you want it to or not. This gives a different feel to games where the player influences what happens and when it happens.
For the moment I’m happy with having Solar Storm and SSO to pull out whenever I have that spaceship disaster survival itch to scratch. It’d be great to see a few more games of this type in the future though. Drawing on Tharsis I’d perhaps like to see features that let you use crew “downtime” to help mitigate bad events in the future. This is admittedly more applicable to games like SSO, where you occasionally get a moment to breath, rather than Solar Storm where you’re lucky if you have enough actions to stay afloat. For example, in Tharsis, in addition to crew abilities and room abilities, you can generate assist tokens that you hold on to and use to re-roll dice when you really need a better roll. This can help smooth out the RNG and leave the player a little less vulnerable to raw chance. As a less abstract mechanic, there could be craftable upgrades/tools that, like assist tokens, would persist and allow a little more control over outcomes.
Possibly I’ve made you interested in these games and you want to try your hand at surviving a spaceship disaster. If so then Tharsis, Solar Storm, and SSO are ready to challenge you. Do you have a game in this style that you’ve enjoyed? If so then I’d love to hear about it over on Twitter.
I am a software developer by day and dip into a range of related activities in my spare time, including working on my own software projects, writing, proof-reading, and, of course, gaming of both the digital and boardgame varieties. I am slowly starting to sink my teeth into game development.