The Telepathic Rat Incident
Things were tense. The dreaded countdown clock was getting closer to doomsday. Several shady characters had been taking actions all over the space station that threatened to unleash chaos even earlier, in the form of deploying an antimatter device or unleashing the mysterious Project X. The Doctor was making a mad dash for the escape pods, and the Boarder wasn’t having it. Some players lamented the Doctor’s proximity to the escape. “Don’t worry, I’m going to blow him up with a missile,” threatened the Boarder.
Desperate to get out, the Doctor made a shrewd deal with the space station’s resident sentient AI. He would escape with a copy of the AI’s data on him, allowing the AI to spread to the far reaches of the universe. After all, that’s how the AI’s player scored the most points at the end of the game—having enough people escape the doomed space station with his data on board. But how could the rogue AI stop the Boarder from bombing the escape pod?
“Oh, I know! You can use the Telepathic Rat to force the Boarder to use his own gun to shoot himself in the face!”
There was a moment of brief silence as the table processed what was just said, and realized… yes, that could work! After all, as everyone knows, the Telepathic Rat could force people to go against their own self-interest, which is an otherwise golden rule in this game. Then came the swell of laughter at the sheer absurdity of the situation, along with all eight players repeating through gasps of laughter: “Use the Telepathic Rat to make him shoot himself”. It became not just an in-joke that’ll be remembered for time immemorial, but also a strong proof of concept for exactly what Stationfall is trying to be.
The Hardest I’ve Laughed at a Table in Years
Stationfall is a really weird game to sell. It’s for anywhere from one to nine players. It has elements of hidden identity games, lots of area movement, asymmetry, and a hint of role-playing. Then take all that, put it in a blender, mix it with a dash of cocaine and a bottle of the hottest hot sauce you’ve got available, and that’s the experience promised by Stationfall.
The game relishes in the sheer absurdity of itself. It’s almost a parody or satire of overly complex board games, but one where the complexity is both the joke and the thing that keeps you going along with it. It’s not thumbing its nose at complex board games, or making gamers the punchline. No, it gestures at itself with open arms and says, “Isn’t this patently absurd what we’re doing here?” and then delivers on that experience with a wink and a nod.
Okay, let’s try that basic pitch again. Players assume the role of conspirators vying to influence a gigantic roster of characters aboard a doomed space station. Out of the whopping 26 characters in the game’s box, 12-20 of them will be present in any given game, giving each game a wide range of variety. Secretly, each player is dealt a hidden identity card face down, revealing their true goal. Each character has a different set of win conditions, usually tied to obtaining a certain item, triggering a specific event, and either escaping the space station or ensuring someone else doesn’t escape. On your turn, you can influence one of these characters to make them open to your suggestions. Any character where you have the most influence (or tied for the most) can be activated to perform up to two actions with a handful of free actions. Perhaps it’s to walk, or pick up a gun and shoot someone with it. Perhaps it’s to double walk to a new location to set up for next turn. Simple, right?
Well, not really, because every other player at the table can place influence and activate your character as well. This leads to absolute chaos as you may not be on the same page as the other players. In my most recent game, I spent two turns trying to have the Billionaire hand-deliver an important briefcase to my Inspector, only for another player to have a different character shoot the Billionaire with a gun for no reason other than gleeful mayhem and interrupting people’s plans. This is chaos, and it’s barely controlled. With more than a dozen characters wandering haphazardly around the space station, you’re bound to have your plans upended at some point.
Four Rulebooks Is Kind Of A Lot
Stationfall’s box says a playthrough should take 90-120 minutes, but I have never had that match reality. Simply put, the rulebooks—all four of them—are uniquely terrible from a teaching experience. First, there’s a tutorial game rulebook, which the game recommends running a couple of times for your first games. Sure, that’s normal enough. Then, the game provides two separate “reference manual” documents that contain the numbered and subnumbered outline of every rule in the game. Finally, there’s a character dossier, diving into detail on the lore and specifics of how each character functions. Four rulebooks total.
In our games, we probably added at least 30 minutes (probably closer to one hour) to each game just bouncing back and forth between the rulebooks to hunt down the exact wording of a specific ruling. Here’s an example: one of the actions you can take is a “timed launch”, which sets an escape pod to launch from the ship on a later turn. Our question was: but how many turns in the future? We looked at the index of the rules reference to see that this mechanic was covered in section 13.6.1. Okay, easy enough! We flipped to that section. It read: “Place a time marker on the Pod. When the time marker is resolved, move the Pod to the Mesosphere.” WHAT? How does the comprehensive rules reference section about the timed launch mechanic not include how the timed launch mechanic works? It took us digging back through the tutorial game walkthrough to find a line explaining that the time markers are placed one round in the future.
The rules reference manuals make a claim that they are the “complete and canonical rules” that supersede all other rules text. The very next sentence, though, claims that these rules are just a reference and are condensed, and that the tutorial book includes more text and examples. However, if you have a question about how your character’s ability works, you’ll need to reference the character dossier, which contains even more specific rules text not found in any of the other books.
It makes learning, teaching, and playing the game a massive headache. It was so much that I put the books away and stopped trying the first few times I tried to teach myself before showing it to friends. It’s a serious ask for gamers to get past the inconsistencies in the rulebook to figure out how things actually work, and it’s worth acknowledging that up front. There’s no cute way around it. The rulebook will be a dealbreaker for some people.
All the Teach of a Heavy Euro, All the Chaos of a Party Game
Rulebook misery aside, the game rules themselves, even if written out perfectly, are really heavy. But once you learn the mechanics of playing, the actual play itself is pretty smooth and buttery. It evokes the complexity of things like Spirit Island or Food Chain Magnate in the teach, but the act of playing feels closer to something like a late-night game of Mario Party or the shouting and laughing in a game like Secret Hitler. Unlike the latter, though, I’ve never seen anyone get truly mad about a move made in this game.
Stationfall is built for betrayal, and it enables you to be exactly as petty as you want to be. Early on, it’s easy to ignore people messing up your plans because everyone’s roles are secret. Once the reveals start coming in, though, you lock down your character so nobody else can activate them, and the betrayals feel much more personal. Watch as your friend struts a robot right up to your player character and bashes them in the head with a wrench, ending your autonomy and forcing you to frantically maneuver another character over to heal them. In one game, my husband and I worked out a deal to bribe each other to take actions: I would bribe him to unlock a door for me, and he would bribe me to launch myself out of an airlock into outer space (don’t worry, I was wearing a helmet). I thought I had pulled one over on him; he thought he had pulled one over on me, until we both revealed and learned we were both playing characters that score double points from bribes at endgame. Fair play.
It’s hard to be too mad at someone for doing something insane like purposefully going down to the Project X vault and unleashing a giant tentacle monster on the ship. Will it kill you and ruin your game? Probably. But hey, the guy who unleashed it had his escape pod vaporized by a chimp holding antimatter. C’est la vie, at least in Stationfall’s orbit.
Who Should Actually Buy This
Do you already enjoy ridiculously over-complex board games? Do you and your friends have the ability to laugh and not take yourselves or your games too seriously? Can you eat a godawful rulebook for an insanely fresh and riotous payoff? Then look no further. Welcome home. We’re happy to have you here. Go buy this and reap your reward.
But let’s be clear: the complexity alone can be a huge turnoff for some people, especially when what lies beneath is a silly party game. And again, I can’t overstate how fiddly the game is, which is exacerbated by the rulebook. Here’s a real example of how setup for this game works. First, shuffle all 26 character cards together and deal out, let’s say, 19 randomly. Then, go through the smaller hidden identity cards and pull out the same 19 cards from there—put the rest back in the box. Next, go find the kompromat tokens that match each character—ah, but these only use iconography to reference each character, so you’ll need to look at each token and scan all 19 characters to see if it’s a match. Once you’re done with that, you get to do the same thing with the 26 wooden meeples screen-printed with the same iconography on them. Done? Good! Now you can start setting up the board, which involves reading through all 19 character cards to see what special changes that character’s inclusion makes to the board setup—that is, after you do the default board setup.
If you’re already tired of reading that, don’t buy this game. You won’t have fun. You’ll be frustrated enough after setup that it’s likely you’d rather toss the game back in the box and go do something else. But if you can deal with a beastly setup and learning curve, you’ll come out the other side with both a madcap board game experience and the desire to rip all the rulebooks apart and rewrite your own.
