Designed by: Tony Go
Deep Space D6 is a solo game where you’re struggling to stop your spaceship disintegrating as it comes under attack.
D6 refers to the set of six-sided custom dice that are rolled at the start of each round: the game proceeds by rolling six of them to see what type of crew you have at your disposal, and then assigning them to their posts on your ship (the board). Different crew do different things depending on which ship you’re flying – the game comes with several – but they’re all to do with avoiding or repairing damage, attacking the enemy threats or retrieving crew. The commander in the introductory board allows you to reassign crew to a different location – placing a medic in the weapons system for instance. When you roll scanners they have to be assigned to the scanning department, and a third die in this location always triggers a new threat – at that point a new threat card is drawn representing the enemy and placed beside your ship. Then a die is rolled to see which enemy ships deliver damage to you this turn, before the process starts again. Damage can be offset by your Shields, but if the shields hit zero then your Hull begins to collapse, and if your hull hits zero you’ve lost the game!
Your objective is to make your way through the entire deck of enemy threats without that occurring, and it’s complicated by the fact some enemy threats are internal: they affect your crew directly; and some have special abilities such as disregarding your shields or doubling the power of other enemy attacks. You also may find yourself without members of your crew while they are injured or scanning: any dice busy scanning for threats do not return at the end of the round. If you can navigate to the end of these threats, you’ve made it to safety and won the game… and if it feels too easy, a subset of the enemy threat cards (the Ouroboros cards) can be combined together to form a kind of finale to the game.
Considerable, but as it's from the game system rather than anyone you call a friend, there's nothing here to get offended by.
Zero.
Light - the challenge is to keep your crew active whilst negating the threats, and oftentimes the dice make those decisions relatively straightforward.
There are a number of different ships to fly and you can change the number of cards in the threat deck for a shorter game. There's also a variant to make things slightly more difficult.
1-1
Players
10+
Years
15-30
Mins
Sam says
I enjoyed Deep Space D6 as a diverting way to spend a few half-hours, and if it doesn't sing out immersive theme or offer deep strategic ponderings, I don't think that was ever the intent. It's meant as a relatively light, mildly addictive, dice-chucking adventure and succeeds as such. You're somewhat beholden to the dice-rolls, and as a result there's less of a sense of story than something like the comparatively madcap solo game Nemo's War, and less of a puzzle than the comparable survive-at-all-costs Lost Expedition. Decisions in Deep Space D6 are pretty straightforward, and whether they prove right or wrong can turn out to depend on a subsequent roll. My main caveat, really, is that lack of input for the player - there's a sense of slight repetition to each round as a result, although you do have the sense of control over your destiny slowly unravelling as, usually, the enemy threats mount up toward the end of the game.