Man, you really can’t say Metascape: Guild Space (1993) wasn’t ambitious. Good lord.

So, you can’t tell from the picture, but this is a massive box. Three inches thick! The only other box set I have that is so big is DragonRaid. There are: five booklets, a sheet of counters, a set of dice (including a unique 16-sided die) and six metal miniatures. I shudder to think what this cost to produce. The rulebook describes the game thus, “The MetaScape Game contains some of the most innovative rule systems ever designed. Powerful, flexible and versatile, MetaScape Game development has utilized mathematicians, physicists, astronomers and other experts over a period of years. Its systems are powerful and detailed, but easy to master.” A few paragraphs later is this troubling sentence, “…all rolls are open-ended. This means you can roll anything from zero to infinity.”

Later, the rules attempt to describe the dice doubling mechanic. I honestly have no idea how it works. Part of it seems to incorporate the idea that a rolled value of 16 explodes, allowed you to roll again and…multiply the results by 16? Forever, if you keep rolling 16s, I guess. All of the support language around this is about as dense as NASA technical documents, but with an aggravating tone of smugness to make matter so much worse. My impression is that this game was designed to show off how clever the designer is, rather that to be playable, and then just pretends no one is smart enough to get it. It’s awful. Especially considering how blatantly derivative most of it is. Nice dark Jedi, there, champ. (I will say the microwave turning into a lady seems pretty unique though).

Despite the grandiose plans in the rulebook, though, Metascape was only further supported by a screen and single adventure. There is apparently a second edition for some reason that I suspect hasn’t fared much better.

Oh, also, this curse was bestowed to me by a follower, but I have misplaced your name, hit me in the comments and I will shout you out!