The game

Just each other.

Nobody is out here. That is the whole problem.

So the map never grows. It only empties.

4X tabletop for two or four players.

Default is 10 The rule is always three One is the exception

The premise

Not all are friends.

When you are left in empty space the friends are the ones you seek out. But not all are friends. That is what you learned when you felt alone.

Every 4X game gives you someone to meet — an empire to out-build, a species to out-think, a neighbour who wants what you have. This one takes that away. You cross the dark expecting to find something, and the dark is empty.

You leave Earth to find aliens but find none. Resources dwindle, and you must fight to survive. Out here you have just each other.

Two players, or four. Five minutes to set up, about an hour a head. With four you start two against two, so three can never gang up on one — the game makes you allies before it makes you enemies.

Alpha

The alpha existed to find out which half was wrong.

A game in progress on a wooden table. A printed paper star map with named
systems, black printed ship hulls carrying upright red and white pillars,
polyhedral dice resting on several worlds, and printed player boards to the
right.

It was the first version that could actually be played, and that is the only thing an alpha is for. What came out of it was not a better game. It was a much shorter list of what the game still had to become — and what it had to stop trying to be.

It started on 27 July 2026 and it was built from the bottom up. It was not decided to be science fiction until the parts were already on the table, and that choice was only ever going to be one of two.

Ninety-five per cent of it was scrapped. Only the missiles survived.

02 eXploit

A map, and ships in union. Space is tethered, but where you find foundation, boredom looms. Only limitation creates value, and Exploitation is where you find it. And when a planet is depleted, you will never get it back.

03 eXterminate

Transport and combat. A whole phase did nothing but move resources between worlds and stack them into a shape meant to hold off the raiding the game had then. Extermination arrived here.

A hard player, and four hours. Played with one of my closest hardcore gamers, it killed eighty per cent of what was left. A single battle took half an hour, sometimes an hour, inside a four-hour game for two. He also brought the rush, in its simplest form.

Last man standing was decided here, and with it the idea that the 4X should run out — a finite game on the far side of the ordinary one.

The battle itself survived. What it needed was speed — enough that a game could hold several fleets and a real clash instead of one duel that ate the evening.

So it was distilled rather than replaced. Thirty spaces of ten steps per phase became three phases, and each one still takes something off the table. That shape was worth keeping. The railgun and the autocannon came in with it, the autocannon to shoot missiles down.

01 Strategy Missiles

02 Tactical Missiles and railgun

03 Havoc Autocannon

Ten slots was the same as no slots.

A ship used to carry ten, and ten felt generous. It was the opposite. With ten slots nothing you pick costs you anything, because there is always room for one more — and ten small decisions a turn add up to no decision at all. Cutting it hurt every time, and it was right every time.

10 → 3

Killing your darlings, three times over.

A choice you can postpone is not a choice.

The first version let you think for as long as you liked, and that is not tension — it is arithmetic. Given enough time there is a correct answer and everyone finds it. Now the die decides if you do not. The clock is not there to hurry anyone; it is there so the decision stays yours instead of becoming the board's.

The rule of three is a ceiling, not a slogan.

Default is ten, the rule is always three, one is the exception. It is a limit on what a person can hold at once: three things you can actually weigh against each other, ten as the number nobody should have to count, and exactly one place where the game may break its own pattern in order to stay balanced.

Fewer choices is the shape of the whole game.

Everything is a choice at the start, and there are fewer of them every turn. The map only empties, the weapons only narrow, the phases only run down. What is left at the end is not really a decision any more — it is living with the ones already made.

Being wrong has to be cheap.

Components laid out on a table: a stack of printed player boards for the
Crimson, Gold and Obsidian fleets, two red sprues of tokens still attached,
a yellow and a white printed sorting tray with lids holding red, yellow,
white and black tokens, and a finished black ship model.

Every cut above was affordable because a version costs a run of one. No minimum order, no tooling, nothing written off when a rule turns out to be wrong — the parts for the next rule are on the plate the same night.

That is the real argument for making them here, and it is not the price per game. A design gets better in proportion to how cheaply it can be wrong, and a factory's smallest order is five hundred chances to be wrong at once.

Engineering

Printed after it is sold, not before.

Everything except the paper, the dice and the packaging is made here, one game at a time, on machines that are already running.

Printed here: Hulls, cargo pillars, tokens, trays, lids
Printed on stock: Player boards, star map, rule and combat cards
Bought in: Dice, packaging

Beta

This is beta.

Beta is where the game changes fastest — what gets cut, what replaces it, and the photographs from the table it happened on.

Four more versions. Three of them are behind it; the fourth is the one on the table now.

01 eXpand

Ten ships, and a production that could not hold them. Ten became the cap. Production was so far out of balance that attacking en masse was the only sane thing to do. Expansion was pinned down here.

Balance, and a bigger map so the fleets needed time to reach each other. Every planet carried its own die, which does not scale past a few worlds, so a hero card took over as the place the state lives.

Twenty thousand games were simulated here — one play style set against another. The weapons came back better balanced than an evening at the table could have made them.

A Kickstarter veteran turned up in the gaming group around the same time — three campaigns behind him, one of them failed. We talked about the printing farm and about why that one went wrong and the other two did not. Thanks for the direction.

03 eXplore

Tokens, and a hold cut to three. Tokens replaced the dice on the planets once the cargo hold came down. Missiles stopped being a finite resource. Cards arrived to move in stealth during a fight, and so did what sits on the worlds. Exploration landed with them.

All four X’s are here now, and not one of them was planned. Exploitation came in the second alpha, extermination in the third, expansion in the first beta, exploration in the third. Each turned up because a particular evening needed it.

The genre lists them explore, expand, exploit, exterminate. This game found them from the other end — the one that is supposed to come first was the last to arrive, and it arrived because the worlds had finally got something worth hiding.

The fighting has settled. It is no longer what changes between one session and the next, and that was the hard half. This is the shape it landed in.

Ships are open. Planets are not.

The asymmetry is deliberate. What you are carrying is public, because a threat nobody can see is not a threat, it is bad luck. What you intend to do with it stays yours. Worlds keep their secrets the other way round: what is built on a planet stays face down until someone comes close enough to look, which is what makes spending a turn to scout worth it.

The dice are the clock, and the clock belongs to the world rather than to the players. A planet counts its own use, and at ten it is gone along with every ship still standing there, including your own. Nobody takes a planet from you. You spend it.

Which way you are pointing is the whole decision.

Both players choose three cards face down and turn them over together. Nose-on, you can fire the railgun. Broadside, you can fire missiles and the autocannon. Never both — so committing to a shot is committing to an angle, and the other player is choosing theirs blind at the same moment.

You can still walk away. Break off at a phase change and your ship lives — but your cargo goes to the other player, and you can only do it in a phase where you have not fired. Run out of road in Havoc and you are close enough to collide, and both of you lose everything you were carrying.

One rule holds the whole thing up: nothing may ever take a player's movement away. Damage costs you what you can do, never where you are.

What is being balanced now is the other half — resources. How fast a world empties. What a factory is worth. What a cargo run costs you in the turns you did not spend fighting.

The next photographs come from the beta table.