Lost Among the Starlit Wreckage

You are a mecha pilot. You have piloted your humanoid machine across the surface of the earth, through the void of space, and among the shattered hulls of space colonies. You have fought a war that has seen cities consumed by fire, fleets of ships struck down by energy weapons, and mecha immolated by their own stricken reactors. You have survived all the way to today, the last battle of the war, waged in the void. Now, your survival is more uncertain than it has ever been.

The visual cacophony of both sides tearing into one another has faded, replaced by the silence of wrecked machines, an open grave of floating bodies, and the last gutters of fire as atmosphere and fuel are consumed from broken ships. Your mecha is laid low, its diagnostic screen awash in the black and red of dead and dying systems as you drift among the debris.

All you have is a dying mecha, an open communications channel, and your thoughts and memories - and the vague hope that someone will find you Lost Among The Starlit Wreckage before it’s too late.

Whether solo or as a duet, play involves setting up a “diagnostic board” of playing cards. A card drawn every round provides prompts for the transmission your pilot is making (or if there’s a second player, the conversation topic between stranded Pilot and hopeful Rescuer), and allows the Pilot to make frantic patch-job repairs to try and buy time. A six-sided die then determines how many cards are drawn and discarded as time passes and the mecha continues to fail. If ten rounds of play pass, the pilot is Rescued from the Wreckage. if the mecha deteriorates too quickly or suffers a critical reactor failure, the pilot will be Lost to the Stars forever.