From Out the Boundless Deep

Looking forward to trying this out!

"and the brief moments the two meet between missions."
Wouhaa....

This single sentence gets me dreaming. I can imagine how this mecanism could bring really great gameplay.

From Out The Boundless Deep is a two-player game about customizing and sortie-ing a mech on dangerous missions in the depths of space.

It's 29 pages, with relatively bare but readable layout for most of the document, and then a really good layout in the back half of the book where the cards are kept.

Yes, cards. Boundless Deep is tarot-based, but not in the way most tarot games are. The vague associations of the cards are less important than their concrete stats.

Yes. This is a *crunchy* two-player tarot game.

The basic structure of Boundless Deep is that one player is a pilot, one player is a mechanic, and you both share custody over a mech in deep space. The mechanic allocates a limited pool of action points after each mission to repair and upgrade the mech, while the pilot takes the mech out afterwards and tries to accomplish an objective that will bring both players closer to their goal.

Both the pilot's and mechanic's phases of gameplay feel interesting, provide a good challenge, and refrain from hogging the spotlight. Neither player's role feels like an afterthought, and the overall game balance feels tight.

However, this mechanical tightness is sort of at the expense of the roleplaying. There are cordoned off spots in the game's structure where the two players can roleplay, but these spots feel kind of incidental. Likewise, the overall narrative isn't super clearly defined. You'll have to figure out on your own what the Boundless is doing in deep space before beginning play.

I don't think these are flaws, but they do make the game feel a bit more like a solid board game with optional roleplaying and less like a roleplaying game with good crunch. You can center the roleplaying more in your own play, but you'll have to put a little extra effort in to do it.

Overall, I think this is a gem. It's got a cool premise, the mechanics are fun and fresh, it's easy to learn, and it's satisfying to interact with. A lot of two-player games lean on the intensity that such a low player count adds to the roleplaying, but here that's kind of secondary. Yes, you can roleplay, but you can also ditch it and just go on cooperative two-player mech missions for your own (and maybe for the galaxy's) survival.