Description

La Oruga is a massive starship, capable of bringing a crew of thousands on a centuries-long journey to found a base on the distant exoplanet Mariposa. However, the ship’s Directorate has become increasingly authoritarian and resistant to change, even as it becomes clear that Mariposa is already inhabited with intelligent life. You are the head of Rift, a resistance movement trying to covertly sway others to your side, seize control of the ship, and change its destination.

ExoShip is a solo spatial puzzle game. Cards represent the ship's founders, which can be manipulated by your actions, randomized events, or by the passage of time itself. A card representing the ship moves decades along a timeline each turn as it travels across the table from Earth to its destination planet. As the ship moves each turn, the eldest founders die while a new generation of founders are added.

At the start, all founders are loyal to the Directorate but their cards can be flipped to join the Rift resistance movement, unlocking powerful unique abilities and earning points toward winning the game. Members of Rift must avoid the watchful eyes of Directorate founders or risk being "disappeared" during the suspicion phase!

Actions include: sway an adjacent Directorate founder to your side, use a Rift founder’s ability to manipulate the grid, or replace a Rift founder with the top founder card from the stack. Once per game you must take an action to change the ship’s destination to the uninhabited exoplanet Axios, but only if the ship’s captain belongs to Rift!

Win by swaying enough points worth of founders to the Rift movement and flipping the destination planet card before the ship arrives. Do you and the Rift founders have the conviction to guide La Oruga to Axios and establish an ExoBase?

—description from artist