Assault Fleet Centauri is a 75 page roleplaying game “Quickstart” by Reizor. To my knowledge the full game is still in development. It’s a spaceship combat roleplaying game, where each player takes command of a warship in the titular fleet, defending the outer planets from the imperialist inner planets.

The game opens with a brief overview of the setting, where the solar system is fully inhabited, but the inner and outer planets are at war. I struggle with extended setting descriptions, but this keeps it tight enough that I don’t tune out, and it uses analogies to modern day locations and relationships to keep things relatable. It’s pretty good as far as setting goes, and if you want to dig deeper, there’s a bunch more on world anvil.

The rules here are designed to focus on captains making the hard decisions of war, managing resources, and commanding crew, and so you’re playing all of these things: Captain, Crew and Ship. Despite the straightforward basic mechanic, which is inspired by Blades in the Dark, but substitutes a dice chain for a dice pool. because you’re covering all of these, the rules are a lot. I’d say there are two perspectives on that a lot: For me, it’s a little too much. But, for you, it might be that being the captain of a spaceship is a bit much, and it feels right to be juggling a lot of balls.

The most complex aspect of the game is the combat, which involves tokens, movement cards, and ship cards, with players and enemies alternating activations. For me, this is a return to the kind of Lancer-style combat that I struggle to referee, but enjoy playing, but I do think that this firm nudge into war game territory is only right for the kind of audience that wants to play spaceship commanders. But here you still need a referee to run those enemies, and as a forever referee, I couldn’t see myself building these battles out. That said, unlike a game like Lancer, Assault Fleet Centauri is designed to be interesting in a vacuum (no pun intended), and so you don’t have to put so much effort into the preparation here, or at least so it appears. And the referee section is quite supportive, providing playsheets and advice on running missions and mission structure, as well as covering some specific locations for you to dig into and base your own locations off. It comes with a free mission pack, “No Win Scenario”, which supports my hypothesis about what Assault Fleet Centauri is supposed to look like at the table: This looks a lot like a Lancer module, albeit without the detailed maps. The players are making hard decisions about dangerous situations, that are likely to result in combat.

In yesterday’s review of Cryptid Keeper, I wondered about the importance of familiarity with specific texts as a scaffold to specific games, and it comes up again here. The only real piece of media I’m familiar with that feels like it fits Assault Fleet Centauri is Battlestar Galactica, but with that being 20 years lost to memory, I don’t think I’d know how to act or what to say in either the role of referee, or as player, if you handed me the complexity of Assault Fleet Centauri. Is it the game’s fault that it doesn’t cater to me, that it assumes that people interested in a spaceship battle roleplaying game are going to be familiar with the Expanse, the Culture, or the Hunt for the Red October? No, I don’t think so, and I don’t think that weakens its’ appeal to those players. A comprehensive system for handing Martian-Outer Planet negotiation would likely weaken the game for them, while simply adding a complex system I’m not interested in, in the name of making it easier for me to understand. I think this is the game it wants to be.

Assault Fleet Centauri is a great roleplaying game for people interested in the kind of interplanetary spacecraft warfare it’s aiming for. It has complex systems, you’re managing hard decisions at crew, ship and command levels, you’re trying to liaise with other captains, and you’re doing it all in the depths of uninhabitable space. But it’s not a bunch of things that I personally relate to more: It’s not an espionage game, it’s not a game of dashing around spaceships making repairs to systems, it’s not a game of space exploration. Don’t look here for that. If you’re looking to feel like you’re the captain of a huge vessel, managing a large crew, and fighting in battles on the scale of light-seconds? I’d check this out. The mission-pack is available for free, if you’d like to have a taste.

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