LEGEND OF THE BLACK SKIES · FOR SCI-FI ADVENTURE GAMERS

Your ship. Your crew.
One galaxy that never pauses, and never slows down.

Every captain is the hero of their own story. In Legend of the Black Skies, ten thousand of those stories can collide in the same stretch of sky, at full speed. Yours might begin with a secondhand ship and a license fresh off a station clerk's desk, or somewhere far stranger.

Start the drydock tour Read the engineering series
About the game

Start solo. Fall in with captains. End up in the battles they name eras after.

You're a swashbuckling adventurer with a crew that depends on you. Take a contract off the station board, run a blockade through contested space, and limp home with a hold full of salvage while your chief grumbles about what you did to her engines. Your crew are people, each with short-term goals and life goals of their own, and helping them get there unlocks real rewards. Their unique abilities are yours to call on, and morale is the throttle: keep it high and they work at full speed; let it slide, and everything they do for you slows down.

You control the pacing through your loadout, with a feel Gloomhaven players will recognize: standard play stays smooth, but in a crisis every decision carries a payoff and a risk. The galaxy is alive around you: thousands of persistent NPCs fly the same ships by the same rules, and when you change the plot, human game masters decide how the world answers.

Then there's the idea the whole design is built around. Every mechanic in Black Skies was shaped from day one so that fleets can converge at full speed, applying lessons from teams that operate at planetary scale: Discord, Google, Uber, Netflix. No time dilation by design. No molasses, no fight slowed to a crawl because the server is busy.

The goal is simple: the biggest battle in the galaxy should play exactly like your first one, and if your shot misses in the chaos, it's because the target dodged or a wreck drifted into the lane, never because a server hiccuped. Curious how that's even possible? The full technical story is an eight-part engineering series at jeffrey.blog.

How it plays

A personal space adventure built to survive fleet-scale chaos.

01

Your crew depends on you

Each crewmate has goals, abilities, and morale. Help them move forward and they make the ship faster, stranger, and more capable.

02

Your loadout sets the pace

Most turns stay smooth, but crisis play asks you to spend cards, take risks, and choose the kind of trouble you can survive.

03

The galaxy plays by one rulebook

NPCs fly ships, carry decks, and follow the same systems players do, so the world can answer you without feeling staged.

04

No time dilation

The largest battle should feel like the first one: full speed, readable cause and effect, and no crawl because the server is busy.

Drydock tour

The hands-on tour shows how ships, crew, cards, capacitors, NPC doctrine, missions, and personal stories fit together.

THE DRYDOCK · A GUIDED TOUR IN SIX CHAPTERS · SCROLL AT YOUR OWN PACE

CHAPTER 01 · THE SHIP

Everything is a card. Every card has an owner.

The hull opens into typed sockets. Modules are cards that live in them, and a socket's shape is its slot type: an attack card like Basic Gun cannot sit in a thruster slot. A damaged module is a dead card until someone repairs it.

SOCKET SHAPE = SLOT TYPE · DAMAGED MODULES DO NOT WORK

CHAPTER 02 · THE CREW

Berths hold people the way sockets hold modules.

The hull sets the crew count, and every crew member brings ability cards of their own, like Tashi's Patch Thrusters. Morale is the throttle: Mara is at 55 and working slow. K-7 is unconscious, not working, never dead. And one berth is open.

UNCONSCIOUS CREW DO NOT WORK, AND NEVER DIE · LOW MORALE WORKS SLOWER

CHAPTER 03 · THE HAND

A hand of real cards. Capacitors pay for every play.

You hold up to five cards from your ship, your captain, and your crew. Playing one drains a capacitor for that ability's duration: Basic Thruster costs about two seconds, Advanced Laser's PrecisionShot locks a cell for most of a minute, and the Emergency Beacon drains the cell it is tied to. Durations shown are illustrative.

PLAYING A CARD DRAINS A CAPACITOR · THE ABILITY SETS THE DURATION

CHAPTER 04 · ANY BRAIN

Two ships. Two decks. One rulebook.

The pirate is not running a script. It plays cards from its own doctrine deck, under its own crest, by the same rules you follow. Flip your helm to doctrine and your Automation deck takes the ship, playing your cards while you sleep.

SAME RULES, SEPARATE DECKS · THE GALAXY DOES NOT RUN ON SCRIPTS

CHAPTER 05 · THE MISSIONS

The world's story arrives as cards.

The world and each region carry mission cards, short-term and long-term. They feed down into the three mission slots your ship carries. Take the relief run, break the blockade, or hold a slot open for whatever you find out there. Mission names here are illustrative.

MISSIONS FLOW WORLD TO REGION TO SHIP · MAX 3 ABOARD · ONE SLOT OPEN

CHAPTER 06 · PERSONAL STORIES

Personal stories nested inside a world story.

Everyone aboard carries one life goal and three short-term goals, and so do the ship, the region, and the world. Watch Tashi source her injector: the goal completes and the reward lands on her card. Her life goal is an engine shop of her own. The captain's is Charted Horizons. Crew goal names shown here are illustrative.

MEET A GOAL AT ANY LAYER, REWARDS FLOW

The heavy fighter opens into its anatomy in the drydock: typed sockets on leader lines name the module cards they hold, Basic Gun in the attack slot, Basic Thruster in the thruster slot, while a damaged utility module burns red
CHAPTER 01 · THE SHIP Everything is a card. Every card has an owner.

The hull opens into typed sockets. Modules are cards that live in them, and a socket's shape is its slot type: an attack card like Basic Gun cannot sit in a thruster slot. A damaged module is a dead card until someone repairs it.

SOCKET SHAPE = SLOT TYPE · DAMAGED MODULES DO NOT WORK

The port-side crew berths: four portraits with name tags, a morale meter under Mara Sol reading 55 and working slower, K-7 unconscious and dimmed, a dashed empty berth marked recruiting, and Tashi's Patch Thrusters card tied to her berth
CHAPTER 02 · THE CREW Berths hold people the way sockets hold modules.

The hull sets the crew count, and every crew member brings ability cards of their own, like Tashi's Patch Thrusters. Morale is the throttle: Mara is at 55 and working slow. K-7 is unconscious, not working, never dead. And one berth is open.

UNCONSCIOUS CREW DO NOT WORK, AND NEVER DIE · LOW MORALE WORKS SLOWER

A fanned hand of five rarity-framed cards, Basic Thruster, Rally, Aerogel Screen, Advanced Laser, Emergency Beacon, above six capacitor cells mid-turn: the big-play cell counts down from forty-five seconds while the red ambush chip warns that three of six capacitors are left
CHAPTER 03 · THE HAND A hand of real cards. Capacitors pay for every play.

You hold up to five cards from your ship, your captain, and your crew. Playing one drains a capacitor for that ability's duration: Basic Thruster costs about two seconds, Advanced Laser's PrecisionShot locks a cell for most of a minute, and the Emergency Beacon drains the cell it is tied to. Durations shown are illustrative.

PLAYING A CARD DRAINS A CAPACITOR · THE ABILITY SETS THE DURATION

TIMERS RUN OFFLINE

An NPC pirate hull under a robot crest slides into formation carrying its own red-backed deck and playing its own cards, while your helm toggle flips to doctrine and your automation deck rises from the stern to play yours
CHAPTER 04 · ANY BRAIN Two ships. Two decks. One rulebook.

The pirate is not running a script. It plays cards from its own doctrine deck, under its own crest, by the same rules you follow. Flip your helm to doctrine and your Automation deck takes the ship, playing your cards while you sleep.

SAME RULES, SEPARATE DECKS · THE GALAXY DOES NOT RUN ON SCRIPTS

World and region markers drip mission cards down leader lines into the ship's three mission slots: relief run and break the blockade sit in two, and the third is a dashed open slot
CHAPTER 05 · THE MISSIONS The world's story arrives as cards.

The world and each region carry mission cards, short-term and long-term. They feed down into the three mission slots your ship carries. Take the relief run, break the blockade, or hold a slot open for whatever you find out there. Mission names here are illustrative.

MISSIONS FLOW WORLD TO REGION TO SHIP · MAX 3 ABOARD · ONE SLOT OPEN

Tashi Voss's crew card under the captain's Charted Horizons trophy: her met goal flag turns cyan and reward glyphs stream onto her card, beside labeled flags for her other short-term goals, all wrapped by dashed region and world rings
CHAPTER 06 · PERSONAL STORIES Personal stories nested inside a world story.

Everyone aboard carries one life goal and three short-term goals, and so do the ship, the region, and the world. Watch Tashi source her injector: the goal completes and the reward lands on her card. Her life goal is an engine shop of her own. The captain's is Charted Horizons. Crew goal names shown here are illustrative.

MEET A GOAL AT ANY LAYER, REWARDS FLOW

Black Skies is in the shipyard. The full-speed promise gets proven in public trials before launch. Card names and rarities above are the real ones from the game's data; drain durations, mission names, and crew goal names are illustrative until balancing settles.

From the designer who shipped Alteil, a live tactical card game with tens of thousands of players, playing card games since Revised-era Magic.

Follow the build: the drydock board → The shop: who builds this Engineers: how it works