Space Couch Command

ONE INSTALL. EVERYONE ELSE SCANS THE CODE. Space Couch Command turns your living room into a starship's bridge. Install it once on the computer attached to your TV, and that screen becomes the viewscreen. - Your crew installs nothing. They scan the code on the screen and their own device becomes their station: phone, tablet, old laptop, anything with a modern browser on your network. - No second copy, no controllers to buy, no accounts, no app store. - Not all in one room? Invite friends through Steam and crew up from anywhere; remote players run the game themselves, so those need a copy each. Just people and the screens already in your house. A CREW OF 1 TO 9 Pick a hull to fit the room. - Five stations for a full bridge. Helm, Tactical, Engineering, Science, Comms. - Smaller hulls merge those duties into fewer consoles — a pilot-gunner, a science-and-comms officer — so four, three or two people still crew a whole ship. - A one-seat skiff puts the whole ship under one pair of hands when you fly alone. - Four extra gun seats on every hull. Nine people fit on one ship. THE BRIDGE ONLY WORKS IF YOU TALK Science's scan is what reveals an enemy's subsystems — so Tactical can't pick a target apart until Science calls out what's there. Engineering decides who gets power while the core heat climbs toward the red line, and life support is a breaker one person is responsible for. Comms hears the pirate's demand and has to relay it before the window drains. When the shields buckle and the reactor's redlining and someone's yelling "HARD TO STARBOARD," nobody is looking at their own screen any more. YOUR STATION - Helm. Fly, run evasive, jump, and plot the next system. Carries the forward-fixed railgun, aimed by pointing the whole hull, plus flares and a jammer against incoming missiles. Flip the map to the PARASCOPE cockpit view and put it on the big screen, so the whole room flies with you. - Tactical. Hold the lock, and pick an enemy apart subsystem by subsystem once Science has resolved it. Phaser banks, torpedo tubes with a real arming delay to set, a missile rack, a rocket pod. - Engineering. A live power budget, reactor heat, overclock and a deliberate vent cycle, damage control that spends salvage, and a conduit-rerouting minigame when something knocks a system offline. - Science. Scan anomalies, derelicts and unknown contacts, chase quest threads, decode the archive, and fly the probe when it is time to go inside. - Comms. Pirates demand tribute; pay, refuse, or bluff about what ship this is. Beaten enemies hail to surrender, and sometimes they are lying. Jam their calls for reinforcements, and work the passive ears channel where enemy chatter leaks intent. Factions remember how you treat them. And when something not human opens a channel, what you say next is the whole encounter. - Cannoneer seats. Dead-simple gun seats for the youngest hands. A cannoneer takes over a phaser bank and fires it at Tactical's lock. Aiming stays Tactical's job, so a kid with one button is adding real damage. DEATH IS PERMANENT Every session is a run through a procedural galaxy: jump between systems, follow faint signals, and slip through wormholes to the edges of the map. Name your ship before you launch; that name is your save slot, and the run waits while the crew sleeps. Death is permanent and deletes the ship. But banked salvage, refits and every fragment of the alien archive you recover carry forward. The next crew starts with the guns you paid for. THE VOID An amber CRT flickers awake: PRIORITY ONE, from Fleet Command. Something is out there, a patch of pure nothing that returns no mass, no light, no signal, on a heading for the inner colonies. Your ship is the closest. What you find is a cloaked ark the size of a small moon, and a sleeping people inside it: the Ossari, fleeing something that takes matter apart and does not stop. The crew stops translating the record's word for it aloud. Investigation becomes evacuation. You cannot win this. The hulls it converts turn up in the enemy packs, and the truth surfaces piece by piece: a half-decoded transmission, a scrap of salvage that shouldn't exist. Nothing gory: the enemy eats matter, not people. The horror is what the instruments don't show you. SEND THE PROBE Some wrecks won't give up what's inside them from the outside. You carry two survey probes. That is it, until you find or buy more. - Science flies it. A real-time crawl through a venting, collapsing interior on a bare vision cone, in the dark. Everything you do makes noise, and the noise meter is the whole game. - Comms runs the scope. Fuzzed echoes, never exact, of whatever is down there. Plus a manual PING that lights up every hazard, cache and exit, and pulls the hunter straight to you. - Something is in there with it — and you don't know until it moves. It wakes to noise, prowls, and shadows the edge of your cone. Corners, silence and the loops in the map are how you survive it. And the ship never stopped flying. If Helm jumps out, the tether snaps and whatever the probe was carrying is gone. A GALAXY THAT FIGHTS BACK - Life support is somebody's job. A breaker, and behind it the crew's radiation shielding: a second health bar the hull cannot protect. Lose the plant, or drift past the sector's radiation line, and it bleeds. It comes back slowly. Empty it and the crew is gone. - Debris storms. Rare systems the chart flags, so going in is a choice the crew makes out loud. Boulders Helm threads, shrapnel the gunners shoot out of the air, impacts that knock a system offline. At the eye of it: a wrecked foundry worth the detour. - Minefields that hunt. Skirt the field and you are fine. Get inside a mine's lock radius and it wakes, turns, and runs you down faster than most hulls escape. Shoot it. - Enemies with doctrines. Brawlers close for the kill, artillery lances you from range, and either will call for help. - Strange new worlds. Planets worth a full survey and worth not flying into, derelicts with DO-NOT-ENTER beacons, drifting megastructures, a sleeping leviathan you can survey for a fortune or wake up if somebody insists. - A supply line. Clear enough systems and the Free Haulers Guild starts running goods to you: a merchant warps into the sector you just made safe. Submarine-tense pacing on a retro-CRT bridge: green phosphor, humming reactors, and a klaxon you never want to hear.