On September 23rd, Hello Games released the Origins update to No Man’s Sky, the latest in roughly a dozen major content updates to the game since it was originally released about four years ago. These content updates have turned No Man’s Sky from an overhyped mess into possibly one of the most celebrated sandbox exploration games available in the digital space. No Man’s Sky is not worth talking about on this tabletop-focused site because of its crossover potential, but rather because of how both its design and post-hoc development have laid it bare in a system sense. No Man’s Sky has three interesting things going for it as a subject: First we saw it fail, then we saw it succeed, and it happens to do both of those things to a mode of gameplay commonly attempted in the tabletop space: the sandbox game.