60 Years in Space is an extremely crunchy space colonization simulator by Andrew Doull, based on the extremely crunchy space colonization boardgame High Frontier by Phil Eklund. It’s a game for an extremely specific type of sci-fi sicko (hi, it’s me, the sicko), and despite a pretty rough launch the game has been regularly updated and refined since its release. I played through a mission using the v5 rules last year, and the following v6 re-organized and streamlined a decent chunk of the game (with some changes in direct response to my play reports).
I recommend reading post 1 of that series to compare the process.
Future Dan here: I wrote most of this post in preparation for an attempted solo campaign. That campaign has successfully wrapped as I write this. It will get a writeup eventually.
1. Space Politics
Space Politics is a color-coded representation of the political zeitgeist on Earth, and how that influences who gets into space and how. It’ll stay in the background of the game, changing occasionally and modifying various rolls we make later. In v.6, Space Politics will also act as your starting Social Trend (trends being background social and technological developments occurring within your faction and the world at large - it’s where all the sci-fi sicko stuff lives).
Space Politics (2d6): 7 - War (Resource War)
“Heightened tensions between Earthside nation-states have resulted in a volatile situation in space where rockets and ray-guns can be retooled into weapons at a moment’s notice. [...] A resource war includes trade wars and fighting over depleting resources needed for space travel.”
Rolling 1d6 for my first trend impact, I get 6: Peace Talks. Looks like we’re nearing the end of said resource war, or at least a ceasefire. Little emergent storytelling prompts like this are a highlight of the game
2. Space Agency
Next up is our space agency and mission control: like space politics, mission controls have a broad archetype with a color code that will provide roll modifiers going forward. The list of archetypes has been expanded since v5, with most colors now having two or more options, and they’ve also been uncoupled from real-world organizations in the base rules, which removes a major issue I had with the previous version.
Normally I would roll here, but for purposes of story I’m going to choose #5 Trade Association, since it falls within the 2d6-2 roll I would normally be making. This means mission control is Green, my spacecraft quality is Medium, and my rank chart is Generic Green. Rolling on the launch facility tables (60Y 34-35) I get Tanegashima Space Center, which is mostly for flavor but can tie into regional events later on.
(It seems the dice gods really want me to play as Japan in this game, I got that last time as well.)
Since in this version of the base rules we don’t roll for a specific real-world group, I’m going to make one up and say that I’m playing as the Toha Industrial Workers Union.
While I’m at it, I’ll generate the factions that are already in space: I just need to go down the list and see if a d6 comes up 1. Red and Purple are in, which actually works great for me because with the space fascists and space liberals in place I get to be the rebel alliance-alike.
3. Mission Control Staff
New to this version of the rules is the framework to play as the space agency itself, with individual crew and staff basically being names attached to skills unless you decide to zoom in. You hire on staff and crew using Control Points, and you start with four of those and gain 1 per year.
(Control Points can also be used to gain tech readiness with a component, pay off debt, or a bump to adjust the result of a roll by 1.)
Future Dan here: I skipped this entire step when prepping for my campaign, because I don’t like the skill system in 60 Years all that much. It wasn’t a huge loss, since I was playing at full zoom-out, for reasons I’ll get into.
Mission Control Staff come with a level of 5 in a single skill, which gives a +1 to any roll where they match skill levels with the crewmember they're helping. I think that's an extra thing to track that makes them mostly useless (vs providing a flat +1 to a skill), in what will become a running theme with the game. But for now, this is quite important because 6 is the magic number.
I’m going to spend all 4 of my Control Points on staff (the power of hindsight says that
Control Points are best spent on staff and debt; tech readiness and
bumps were effectively useless in my campaign.)
- Head of Sciences (Prospect 5)
- Head of Operations (Industry 5)
- Head of Research (Research 5)
- Chief Information Officer (DevOps 5)
4.1 Crewmember Abilities
I can have up to 8 crewmembers, which are generated by drawing three cards from a standard deck to determine the level of their primary ability (1/2 card value, rounded up; faces = 5, aces are special), which is then used to derive their skills. All their other attributes are treated as 3.
Just as an example, I'm going to go with a minimum crew of 4.There are four abilities - physical (clubs), mental (spaces), social (hearts), and capital (diamonds) - each with specific skills associated with it. Selected cards are bolded.
- Crewmember 1: 10S, 6D, KH => Social 5
- Crewmember 2: QC, 3D, 5C => Physical 5
- Crewmember 3: 4D, 4C, 9S => Mental 5
- Crewmember 4: 3S, JC, QD => Capital 5
Next is skill selection, which is a major problem.
4.2 Crewmember Skills
Skills are wildly unbalanced between abilities:
- Physical: 2 skills (Bypass, EVA)
- Mental: 12 skills (Combat Ops, Devops, Ecology, Engineer, Industry, Medical, Mining, Pilot, Prospect, Research, Suffrage, Teleops)
- Social: 1 skill (Negotiate)
- Capital: 4 skills (Activism, Antitrust, Recruit, Trading Desk)
Nearly twice as many Mental skills as all others combined. Crewmember #1 up there is useful for exactly one type of skill check (and #2 is barely better). For everything else, the best they could start with is 4, which is the worst you can get from someone with the correct ability for it. I’m aware that you’re meant to compensate for these deficiencies using your mission control staff and increasing crew skill levels over time, and that failure is supposed to lead to interesting and often catastrophic complications. I get that. I still don't think it works in practice.
5. A long aside about the 60 Years skill system
Skill checks in 60 Years are 2d6 roll under your skill level, as in Traveler. This comes with complications:
- If you don’t have training in a skill, you roll under the relevant ability on 3d6.
- If you have chrome on a skill roll (from meeting certain conditions, usually ownership of a patent for the equipment you're using), you roll one less d6 for the check.
- Since the game is designed for your crew to modify themselves, increasing your skills and attributes is a core part of the premise and rules-as-written they're supposed to be tracked per individual.
- If you have 6+ in the appropriate skill and chrome, you automatically succeed and your roll is there purely to see if you have a complication.
- You're going to have chrome for most rolls you make in the game when zoomed out (since it's pretty difficult to get your hands on a spacecraft you didn't build yourself, which means that as soon as you hit a skill value of 6, skills literally do not matter.
Now, I like the idea of the system in principle: space operations are too expensive to justify anything short of extreme operational competence and failure is liable to come from defects in the machinery (something the game tries to simulate). Chrome is basically a way to bake "don't roll if success is guaranteed" into the procedures - but it also asks me to track 21 skills per crewmember (since while crew start with only 3 skills, they will quickly gain more from participating in Operations or getting upgrades) for a mechanic that was only relevant 8 times in an entire 60 turn campaign.
The character sheet provided in the book are pretty perfunctory and not really made for tracking changes over time, and while I could probably have made up a better layout for it I really didn't have any reason to do so: it's pretty difficult to end up with a crewmember who has anything lower than a 5 for their main ability score, and so I just said "the crew as a collective starts with a 5 in every skill, and every era that passes that value goes up by 1" for my own campaign. It worked, and it was still barely relevant.
But for the purposes of the post, I'll pick the following. "Held Skill" designates skills that are held in reserve to be determined later, per the rules.
As an alternative, you can treat the crew as a collective and start with 5 in all abilities, and then fill in four skills at 6, three skills at 5, two skills at 4, one at 3 and one at 2.
But yeah, I dumped all of that when I ran my campaign and it was fine.
6.1 Spacecraft Overview
All spacecraft are going to have a crew module to carry people and a thruster to get them to the destination. The payload will vary according to mission type - for a bog-standard industrial mission, I need a robonaut to prospect the site and a refinery to turn into an automated factory. These components (as well as thrusters) can have additional requirements, which can be met by including reactors or generators (to produce energy), and radiators (to vent waste heat), but we’ll get into those later.
Note: Andrew told me this entire section is going to get overhauled in the next major update, though what I’m describing here will still be around as an alternative procedure in one of the other books.
Starting craft have a spacecraft quality - this won’t be relevant after you build your first factory and refit your ship, but for now it’s a way to provide variety for your maiden voyage. As a Trade Association, my starting rocket is medium quality, and rolling 2d6 on the Medium Quality Ship table (SI 191) gets me 5+6 = 11 and the following traits:
- Thruster Quality: High
- Radiator Quality: High
- Refinery included in mass?: Yes
- Refinery Quality: High
- Payloads: Substitute Thruster
- Damage: None
So I get a high quality craft with a substitute thruster. Fine by me. High quality craft sidestep a lot of the construction process, since they’re high quality by merit of all their parts working together in harmony from go, but the substitute thruster is a nice wrench in the works.
6.2. Spacecraft Construction
Substitute thrusters (SI 195) come in two varieties, robonaut and bernal. There’s no apparent roll to see which subtable you get, so I did odds/evens and got robonaut. Good thing too, bernals are heavy as shit on account of being entire space stations
Future Dan here: I am realizing now that bernals are probably only used as substitute thrusters when you’re on a mission to move a bernal, since the egregious 10 mass of the bernal is less egregious if you aren’t also carrying a thruster around.
A roll of 3 on the substitute robonaut table gets me Tungsten Resistojet which starts me with the base stats of a Hall Effect thruster. But since everything is high quality, I don’t need to build off the base, I can pop over to the high quality craft table (SI 203) and roll a d6 for my loadout: a 1 gets me the following components and stats.
- Reactor: Rubbia Thin Film Fission Hohlraum
- Generator: AMTEC Thermoelectric
- Robonaut: Tungsten Resistojet
- Refinery: Carbochlorination
- Dry Mass: 5
- How heavy the craft is without fuel
- Thrust: 1 ● 1
- First number is how many burns I can make per turn, second number is how many fuel steps each burn costs me. My craft’s mass will determine how many fuel steps I get for a given unit of fuel, so that doesn’t need to be worried about for now.
- ISRU: 3
- In-situ resource utilization - how well my equipment can deal with conditions on the ground. A lower number is better & means I can operate at sites with less water.
- Therms: 2
- How hot my equipment runs - I’ll need radiators to cool this.
Now, you might notice here that the component list is a bunch of technobabble to make Scotty proud and no stats. There are stats for components, but they’re in another book (A-Base D-Landing): this is going to get fixed in the next update, and not a moment too soon - when you get into factory building and building new ships, it becomes really important to know what components are compatible with what and what requirements they have.
Using the full info, my components are:
- Hall Effect: Mass 1, Thrust 3 ● 2, Rad-Hardness 5, Water Fuel
- Rubbia Thin Film: n reactor, Mass 1, RH 5, 1 Therms; -2 thrust, ½ fuel consumption
- AMTEC Thermoelectric: e/H-generator, requires n reactor, Mass 1, RH 6, 1 Therm
- Resistojet: Mass 0, requires e-generator, RH 5, ISRU 3
- Carbochlorinator: Mass 2, requires e-generator
This gets me the same numbers in the end, but you can see how everything fits together much better this way.
Now I take these numbers and apply the modifications from the resistojet thruster: +2 thrust, x2 fuel consumption, 1 Afterburn, and -1 Mass, which is less than ideal but not the worst it could be: Mass 4, 3 ● 2 +1AB, ISRU 3, RH 5, 2 Therms
Nearly there: to deal with that waste heat I go to the High-Quality Radiators table (SI 190) - I pick the Magnetocaloric Refrigerator: 2 Mass, cools 2 therms, requires e-generator, RH6. After that, all I need to do is stick a 1 mass standard crew module on this thing and we’re good to go.
My craft’s final stats are:
- Dry Mass: 7
- Thrust: 3 ● 2 +1AB
- ISRU: 3
- Rad-Hardness 5
- Therms: 2 (-2)
Only thing left to do now for character creation is smash the champagne and give it a name. To keep with the theming of the Hayashida mission, this one will be named the Kui.
Wrap-Up
The greatest obstacle between 60 Years and the player is information presentation. This is to be expected from a game of this complexity, and there have been improvements since v1, but the issues remain: information is broken up between segments or even books, leading to constant flipping back and forth. The order of topics in the book doesn't align with the order of play. LATEX can't handle tables and so forces them out of order and breaks the surrounding text. Information is often duplicated where it doesn't need to be, elided when it shouldn't be, or confusingly worded.
However: I had fun putting this together (and as a spoiler for the future, the campaign was also a lot of fun.) When the issues above are pared away (in my case, by spending a whole lot of commutes reading the books and then writing a cheat-sheet for myself) the underlying systems are manageable, if wonky, and I'd say with the updates its gotten to a "recommend with big caveats" state - the game is still rated S for Sickos, but if you're the right kind of sicko, ey, you might have a good time.
The worst / best part of all this is the realization that I could hack together a solid SCP-management sim game out of this chassis.
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