Furries… in… Space!

This is why you keep those old gaming books on your bookshelf. After a year and a half of my son (12 going on 13) only wanting to play Dungeons and Dragons every blessed weekend, I finally got a break. The #$@& shutdown pushed our weekly dungeon crawl online. With his school online, the last thing my boy wanted to do after eight hours of Zoom classes was four more hours of Zoom gaming.

So with me being burnout of D&D, and his sister (9 going on 10) having about an hour limit before getting bored with his campaign, my boy was at an impasse. I suggested, “What about this old game I could never get anybody to play?”

Once you get past the fact that it’s furries in space (no really, it’s “anthropomorphics”), it’s a really neat universe. It’s based on an 80’s comic book called Albedo. You play an officer in sci-fi military, fighting Nazi rabbits (not making this up), but despite that, the action is good and really deadly for both sides. This war pulls no punches and your players are right in the middle of it.

What makes this game perfect for small gaming groups is that you’re not only an officer, but you command four “supporting characters.” So your fireteam lives and dies by your actions, and if one or two dies, your player feels the grief of characters dying without slowing down the plot to make a new character.

There’s a learning curve to figuring out the system (true with any new system), and there are some aspects of the game that STILL aren’t clear, but I’ve played four sessions with my kids and they have a great time. Of course, my son is playing a murder hobo and my daughter is only interesting in promotion (and not developing her skills to be able to perform her job), but they’re happy!

If you want to try this out, the publisher put out the gaming engine (sans furries) as open source and called it Magenta. So if you weren’t lucky enough to win this in a gaming store contest, you can read it here: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/128371

Meanwhile, I’ll keep you posted on my kids’ new combat engineer company as they fight their way across another planet.