Most big science fiction properties today err on the side of science fantasy. Star Wars is basically swords and sorcery in space, and Star Trek’s post-scarcity antimatter economy is built to support its storylines, not the laws of physics. In the tabletop RPG world, though, there are a few options for somewhat harder space sci-fi, especially if your definition of hard sci-fi includes horrors man wasn’t meant to know as well as the strong possibility of explosive decompression or straight up getting sucked out an airlock.

Today we’re going to look at two gritty space horror games which, through relatively light rules and strong emphasis on random outcomes, are easy for players but very tough on characters. Death in Space is created by Christian Plogfors and Carl Niblaeus, members of the Stockholm Kartell alongside the creators of Mork Borg and CY_Borg. Mothership is created by Sean McCoy and distributed and developed by Tuesday Knight Games, who are in the process of bringing the new Mothership box set into distribution as of this writing. Both games are about freelancers trying to survive deep in space, and quite often failing to survive deep in space. Despite similar rules and character survivability, each game has a degree of nuance with how it approaches the gameplay loop.