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.
I bought this game used, painted the miniatures, read the rules, and sold it. lolol.
I just didn’t think building the terrain was worth the hassle. “The juice wasn’t worth the squeeze”
Plus I looked at all the modular stuff they were trying to get me to buy and add into the game to make it complete. I already have one modular collectathon money pit sinkhole game (Shadows of Brimstone) and I didn’t need another. I also got the vibe from the instructions that the game was really, really not designed to be played by one solo crew. So I opted out. I bought it used and sold it for about what I payed for it.
Original Core Space really was designed with competitive multiplayer in mind. It wasn’t until First Born that they moved towards designing the game for solo/coop with a single crew. And then Maladum was refining that.
I’d say that if you don’t have time for long setups then it’s definitely not worth it. I recall a couple of times where we had to skedaddle so quickly that setup might’ve been longer than the game itself. However, if time isn’t a concern (we have a dedicated table and I can take time here and there throughout the day to setup the terrain) then it is one of our favorite coop systems. Though note that we don’t play a lot of skirmish games because my wife has a rule about games that require rulers. And the thing in Core Space/First Born is somehow just a transparent plastic bit that measures ranges and certainly couldn’t be used to count inches…
It is definitely a money sink too. We love First Born but the core game experience is going to feel a bit empty compared to having all the NPC expansions. The ruins you explore stop being so remote and start feeling more like scavenger central with random groups of people and different factions just showing up all the time. And this is part of what ends up driving the emergent narrative.
I mean, I’ve spent much more on SoB, but it is not a cheap game to get into.
