Sci-Fi Games

I keep bouncing around these sci-fi games. I ran a Star Frontiers campaign for 30 years, and it is hard to return. I love the setting so much, but part of me says I have seen and done everything in that rules framework, and what is left? FrontierSpace is excellent, regardless. It is one of the best sci-fi games out there, and it improves on the source inspiration in every way - especially action economy.

Part of me explores sci-fi games to explore.

The 5E sci-fi games attracted me for a while, but I slowly realized they shared the same fatal flaws of 5E. Power comes too easy, the gimmie-gimmies they hand out become boring, and the challenge evaporates without fear of losing or character mortality. Most 5E games are enormous, unbalanced, and poorly tested frameworks of magic powers, and martial and skill characters get a bag of rocks like Charlie Brown on Halloween. They are often beautiful games, but the curse of 5E drags them down by replacing solid design with copy-and-paste SRD mechanics.

I love the looks of the 5E sci-fi games, but they did not hold my interest and will likely be sold.

Star Crawl is like the DCC sci-fi supplement, and it leans heavily on DCC for content. I wish this had more in the way of random tables, gear, weapons, monsters, starships, etc. If this were a 600-page book filled with crazy sci-fi adventure, it would be amazing. To get the sci-fi feeling I want, I would put a lot of work in to fill out the parts I want or keep it fast and loose.

I can see playing Star Crawl because I love DCC, and this would be a silly experience of zero-level funnels killing every red shirt on the ship and doomed starship crews flying into the sun. As a B/X style parody game of sci-fi, this works, and the fun is there.

Cypher is Cypher and excellent. This is a rules-light and generic game that does sci-fi well by not having a lot of stuff but by having excellent narrative mechanics. What the game lacks in pages of sci-fi tech and junk is a fantastic story engine that keeps going. Once I start playing Cypher, the story writes itself, and who cares about piles of sci-fi junk? Everything is boiled down to d20 rolls, and I have had car-on-car combats that were better than Car Wars, and this could not do starship combats equally well.

I could play Cypher sci-fi and have fun. The story engine works, and everything can be abstracted to fill the narrative in nicely. The treasure-like cyphers work well for the sense of wonder and discovery.

GURPS Space has fantastic characters, but the starship combat plays like a physics simulator and a game of Space War where tiny ships are vectoring and speeding past each other in the blink of an eye. Nobody can hit each other - let alone find each other. A starfighter combat typically ends with two starfighters lost in space and wondering if the other fighter they saw was real or imaginary.

I could return to this game, but I wish the starships were abstracted and fought more like characters on the hex grid. This is still some of the best hard science gaming out there, and it replaces Traveller for me.

Stars Without Wonder is another excellent sci-fi game. This game has enough 'stuff' to keep me interested and playing various sci-fi games, from starship fights to mechs. The entire game is discovery, with randomly generated universes making each new star system a potential campaign world. This is another game that replaces Traveller for me, just because of the amount of fun the game's charts create.

I could see SWN becoming my go-to sci-fi game. Frontier Space is very close just in fun factor and action economy. Still, SWN has a lot of stuff and scratches that vast-universe sci-fi itch where fleets battle, mechs wage war planets ide, and the colossal space opera of the galaxy feels as big and enormous as I envision a sci-fi game should be.

SWN reminds me of how big the old Space Opera game felt. You played that game because you wanted to feel minuscule in a vast sea of stars with a billion planets and trillions of things going on all at once. Your story happens on a few points of light, and you try to make your way through the stars and tell that tale of tragedy or heroism.

Most other games on this list feel small, except SWN and GURPS Space. And small is more a focus than an actual size of a galaxy. With 5E or even a DCC-style game, it is the dungeon that is the focus. It's the same with Frontier Space, but that game has more of a sweeping and planetary scale, like a pulp-adventure game. Cypher focuses more on a narrative than a galaxy; the universe you play in is your story.

SWN has this Space Opera feeling, where you could fly into the middle of a war between two factions you have no idea are; they are fighting in space and on the planet with mecha and troops, and you survive by getting in and getting out before either side knows who the heck you are and why you are there - and taking fire from both sides all the way.

And all the stuff is there. Your ships, those mechs, the weapons, and the rules to create the factions and world - it is all there like some fractally created Minecraft world that builds itself and challenges you to explore it.