Daniel (@dungeondive) calls Core Space his favourite game of 2019 — and it wasn’t even on his radar. Battle Systems, long known for their cardboard 3D terrain, designed this sci-fi skirmish to live inside their cyberpunk sets, and the result feels less like a rules-bound game than a living system the players inhabit. You run a crew of traders — space pirates and smugglers scraping by — hunting loot and salvage to upgrade your ship and characters while the biomechanical Purge spread across the board to wipe out all biomass.
What sets it apart is how fluidly it shifts between modes: solo, co-op for up to four, competitive, and semi-co-op, all without changing a thing, sometimes drifting between them mid-mission. The economy is brutally tight (one or two points of armour matters), the dry-erase character dashboards track a real build over a campaign, and the iconography-dense skill system rewards repeat plays. NPCs, civilians, gangers and a rising threat track turn a quiet three-model opening into a board overrun by a dozen warring factions. Daniel even received a deluxe Kickstarter box by accident. His verdict: an astonishing, story-generating sandbox — if you have the space to keep it set up.
Core Space’s great strength is also its great demand: it begs to stay set up on a dedicated table. Do you keep a game permanently deployed, or does pack-down kill it for you?
This is my favourite game I have never played!! I have just never got round to it, but have used the assets in a bunch of other games.
I have trialled a little bit of the setup and tear down, and personally didn’t find it too brutal. Gloomhaven is my yardstick for Too Long, and this didn’t seem worse.
I agonised over that. I think I would love it, but just didn’t have any of the required resources (time, space, money, energy, you name it) to dedicate what it deserves.
Yeah, I have not dug into Maladum at all yet. But I think I have the entirety of Core Space/First Born (except for the elusive Rogue Purge expansion) assembled at this point. And some extra terrain. Once you get playing and see how it works it’s really easy to create your own missions or just modify existing ones to fit what you’re doing. And it always seems to generate some cool emergent narrative for us. But setup is long. And my wife refers to it as “our play-set” when it’s on the table.
But motivating ones’ self to sit down with some glue and snips and get it all built and organized… That’s a tall order. Similar to if you’ve ever gotten a big haul of Shadows of Brimstone all at once.
