Description

A star is dying. Harvest resources, hire crew, modify your ship, and manage to get out with the highest profit before it supernovas.

Novanauts is a card and dice game for 2 to 4 people that will take around 1 to 2 hours to complete. Players in the game act as the sponsor of a space salvage mission. The star in this solar system is close to going supernova, so time is limited.

Each player starts with a ship capable of harvesting resources from available planets in the solar system for profit. Each planet has a unique mixture and abundance of each of the possible resources: Noble Gas, Organics, Mineral Ore, and Research Samples. Resources are claimed by rolling dice to see if a particular harvest was successful. The monetary value of each resource is set by a market, which shifts up and down as demand grows or shrinks for the resource.

As the game progresses, players will hire crew and buy modifications to enhance their ship and gain new abilities to help them reach this goal. Crew usually grants small buffs, and modifications often grant new abilities. While a handful of weapons exist to punish a player who has put all his victory points in one basket, it is often not an efficient use of time or resources to pursue hostilities.

The game progresses through events called solar instabilities. Each die roll has a chance to produce one or more of these events. As more and more of these events occur, the player's home base, Stardock, slowly moves further and further away from the unstable star. When the Stardock reaches the last planet in the system, it prepares to leave and does so immediately before the star explodes.

The game ends when either the star goes supernova (harming any players still left in the solar system) or every player safely leaves before that point. The winner is the player who has accumulated the most victory points through collecting money, crew, modifications, and research samples.