Solar Ocean: Colonies is a game with two faces. On one, it’s a 4-Ex Tabletop Strategy Game, on the other, it’s a Tabletop Role-Playing Game. In both versions, Solar Ocean: Colonies portrays humanity in a time of rapid expansion and colonisation through the known cosmos.
It’s decades into the New Age of Exploration fuelled by the opening of weir-gates into distant reaches of space and time. Humankind, represented by 12 space-faring Factions, have begun to venture out of the Cradle System Sol, to find a mostly silent and lonely cosmos dotted with frequent remains of ancient civilisations everywhere (in the form of Xenotek), but no living members of alien civilisation.
There are fantastic beasts and life forms everywhere, and ecologies and ecosystems as diverse as silicon-based non-oxygen worlds, to surprisingly liveable earth-analogues, but no contemporary xeno-sentience to speak of. The mystery of the age-old Fermi Paradox confirmed sets the central theme of the mystery behind the Solar Ocean: Colonies narrative.
The RPG Experience
Solar Ocean: Colonies RPG, also named “All These Distant Horizons”, places the players in the shoes of JACOB (Joint Assets and Colonial Operations Bureau) Agents.
As a recommended standard, scenarios would start out at either Charon’s Gate Station orbiting Pluto, Center for all JACOB Operations, or on a Gateship bound for the Colony Space, and expand out from there. However, game masters are of course free to run their own stories any way they see fit.
The 4X Experience
2-6 Players / 2-6 Hours
The 4X SO:C Game pits the players against each other as they start with a single Gateship and 1000 colonists, and try to build the infrastructure for the whole-scale colonisation of a Quadrant of the Colony Space. At the end of their given allotment of turns, their achievements are tallied into Medals, that celebrate anything from military prowess to colony-building, and even criminal acumen. It’s possible to win any number of medals. There are often multiple winners in any given session of SO:C.
