Jeeze. This is Mobius I, another space-faring strategy play-by-mail game from Flying Buffalo. All the other PBMs we’ve looked at so far are super brief rulebooks, maybe 16 stapled pages? This one is 80, perfect bound. Thematically, it seems very similar to Starweb, but, like, if Starweb went to college and grad school and got like three degrees. The orders, which are always the most baffling parts of these games for me, here are like, weird little flow charts, or programming diagrams. I would fail so utterly at playing this one right, I think.

It supports less players than Starweb, but the playing field is smaller — just 60 solar systems — so there is less elbow room. Meaning, this is almost certainly going to get down to protracted warfare. Games are limited by turns, with the person having the most points at the end winning. Apparently two dozen turns is the short game, which seems really short considering the number of characters a player can manage (99 is the max, but the workable average also seems to be about two dozen), each with their own job. That’s a lot of moving parts to track. I can’t imagine what a single processed turn sheet looks like, they must be massive (and pricey!).