Scrapjacks - trial game at Graham's

Graham kindly invited me roud for another game. This time we were trialing the pre-release version of 'Scrapjacks' by Stalker 7. This is a cooperative (or even solo) Sci-Fifsalvage game; where your team of four has to explore and recover items from desolate areas of space. Assume broken spaceships, abandoned stations, but are they actually abandoned?

As Graham and I were trialing there were no official floorplans or models, yet. So, an ad-hoc selection of miniatures from Graham's amazing collection (more retro spacesuits/diving suits than hi-tech gear here) and his great portable terrain system. Our team of four enter the area. Each team is made up of different characters, and I'm sure as the rules are finalised, more will become apparent, but ours had a hacker, a fighter, a medic and a fixer types, giving a useful spread of skills across three different stat types. Aim is to sweep each room for goodies and salvage, complete missions for rewards, and survive.

That last bit is harder than it sounds, because no character is perfect, and to complete actions beyond just wandering about, you need a 4+ on either a d6, d8 or d10. Once your character takes hits, you loose access to the upper dice, the median, and lower, then you die. You alos loose automatically if your characters use up all their air supplies. You can retire and regroup, but do that too often, and your profit share decreases as the 'Company' recoups its losses (they already take the lion's share of any loot you gather anyway). Also, as you moe about, each turn there are additional perils that lurk. In this case, while we explored this room, we kept getting suit degradation from weird alien moulds. Spend too long with a holey suit, and your characters leak air, meaning chances of success diminish, as you have a finite air supply, and it is NOT large!  Here, two character's suits are in need of repair. This is what the medic character is really good at, however, patch kits run out once used, and you can only carry so many...

Then we could not get the exit door open for ages (always read the character small print Graham!), and a rival gang appeared, looking to relieve us of our loot 'what we found fair-and-square!'

We saw them off, and retired to refitted and recovered before cracking on with room two. Which, despite having an initial artificial gravity failure, involving some quick problem solving, saw us come out with bonus air, all the loot and a mission completed in record time before anything too nasty happened to us.

A quick, fun game, perfect for after work. We did admit we got lucky on both rooms and managed to survive. Some players accounts had rooms chock full of nasties from the off, including multiple repair bots (not friendly) and rival gangs. We just got 'natural hazards' which will take time to kill you instead, so speed was our friend!

Graham will test it again with other players, just to see whether we just got really lucky. The game is well thought out, and had some fun mechanics. The unpredictability of hazards and loot was thought provoking, and knowing each turn, unless you have aced the scenario, you had a random challenge to face with all characters, definitely added to the fun.

 We did think unless carefully crafted, future scenarios might become a bit 'samey', so we wondered how other scenarios/rooms would shape up, and how the rules would build in variety (as if trying to survive in a lethally hostile environment is not exciting enough as it is). Graham will buy the full rules, and find out.