Billed as the “Tabletop Starship Simulator,” Battlestations is the long-awaited second edition of the classic board game/RPG hybrid where players collaborate to accomplish a variety of missions like fighting space pirates, smuggling, and piloting through asteroid fields.
Designer Jeff Siadek (Lifeboat, Desert Island) and Producer Joey Vigour (Chaosmos) have worked for over a year on the project, and the Battlestations universe and mechanics have been growing since the year 2000.
Battlestations is a multi-map board game that simultaneously features ship-action in space AND the events on board the ships involved in the conflicts. Several video games like FTL have emulated this concept, but Battlestations is still the true original, and still the only board game that puts you on board a starship with ongoing adventures for your characters learn from and grow. The game rules are very simple but they allow for complex RPG-like imaginative choices like teleporting to an enemy ship, hacking their helm controls and steering their ship towards a black hole before ejecting yourself out the air lock.
“Originally, this was going to be a video game,” says designer Jeff Siadek. “My brother Jason and I tried to get a video game off the ground but couldn’t find the right publisher or enough funds so I re-imagined it as a board game.”
Sixteen years and 10 supplement books later, the new edition has finally debuted on Kickstarter with miniatures and all-new art. It fully funded in just over a day and the team has revealed stretch goals like guest missions by Richard Garfield and other famous designers, and several new miniatures.
