This is an adaptation of the Desolate boardgame by Grey Gnome Games. The creator has kindly given me permission to distribute this. You can find an official print-and-play edition of Desolate on PnPArcade.

If you have previously played Desolate then this is a one-to-one translation of the game to digital text-based form so there shouldn't be any surprises.

I have implemented it as a text-based game which runs in a Windows terminal. Input is via keyboard in order to enter choices for what to do next.

Description of the original board game:

There was no communication with Station 4 on the distant moon, X483. You were part of a rescue mission to investigate the silence. Upon arrival your ship lost the use of its controls and crash landed but meters away from the station.

Once inside you realized something terrible had happened. The station was occupied by aliens!

Stranded, you must make your way through the station to locate enough power cells to activate the escape shuttle. Will you be able to survive the horrors of the abandoned station?

How to play

Your goal is to collect 5 power cells without running out of health or oxygen. The game has an exploration deck (a card deck that is part of the boardgame) that represents rooms to explore and encounters with aliens.

The game is split into "levels", which represent one use of the entire exploration deck, after which it is shuffled and a new level starts. Each level contains multiple "turns". Each turn consists of drawing two exploration cards. You are shown one and must decide whether to resolve that card or the unknown second card. When a level ends you consume 2 units of oxygen. If you reach 0 then you die.

Rooms provide you with the stated reward directly. Power cells can be found in Engineering. Conflict cards have an associated value, shown for example as "Conflict (4)". This value is added to a randomly generated value (1-6) to give the alien's health. When combat starts you automatically take a random amount of damage (0-4). You decide how much of your ammo to use in each combat round. Each unit of ammo gives you a dice roll, which are all added together to give the damage caused to the alien. If you haven't killed it then it damages you again (0-5 points) and a new round starts.

For those familiar with the boardgame, the random values are generated from a conflict deck that this game maintains behind the scenes.

The video shown on this page demonstrates a single play of an earlier version of the game.

Terminal size detection and colour support

As of v1.3, Desolate supports coloured text and proper line wrapping with automatic detection of terminal size. This should provide a significantly nicer experience when playing but is a huge update of some very core things. As such, it is possible there may be problems.

If Desolate fails to detect your terminal size then it will display a message:

Unable to detect terminal size. Check the store page for a workaround.

If this happens then a workaround is to create a file named desolate.conf in the same directory as the executable and add the following lines:

[ui]
terminal_width=120

(Change the value to a number that works for you. Note that this won't resize the terminal, it will wrap the text based on the value you gave.)

Also, if you prefer the old style game without colour then you can add the following line under the ui section:

use_colour=False

So if you had both lines it would look like:

[ui]
terminal_width=120
use_colour=False