Start solo. Fall in with captains. Make the galaxy answer.
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. 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.
The galaxy plays by one rulebook. Captains, crews, ships, NPCs, and missions all move through the same card-driven systems, so the biggest battle should feel like the first one: no time dilation by design.
YOUR SHIP · YOUR CREW · ONE GALAXY AT FULL SPEED
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
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 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
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
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
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
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. 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.
The galaxy plays by one rulebook. Captains, crews, ships, NPCs, and missions all move through the same card-driven systems, so the biggest battle should feel like the first one: no time dilation by design.
YOUR SHIP · YOUR CREW · ONE GALAXY AT FULL SPEED
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 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
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
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
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
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.