Münchhausen in Space

When you are suffering from depression, every activity seems too much trouble. Nothing looks interesting, you don’t have any energy, your brain doesn’t work… on your best days you are basically waiting until it’s time to go to bed again. If you don’t do anything, it will only get worse. But doing anything is the whole problem. You need to pull yourself out of a mire by your own hair, Münchhausen style. While being worst suited for this task.

Astroforce to the rescue

So in therapy you learn: do something you’d enjoy in better times. No, you aren’t going to enjoy it. Do something “potentially pleasant”. Make a list of things you used to enjoy. Pick something of that list a few times a week.

I made a list.

• Play solo board games

Didn’t feel like it 😄

Potentially Pleasant

Well, what did I really like, back when I was another person? Rolling dice, I guess. So, perhaps I should get One Deck Dungeon out of the drawer. Or maybe a game with custom dice. I love custom dice!

Love 'em

Astroforce is one of my favourite dice games. And it is perfectly suited for the task at hand.

Easy Does It

First of all, it has difficulty settings. Like I said, your brain won’t work, so let's not be ashamed to play a game on easy. Then, it has both a short and a lengthier version. Now that there were months in which you didn’t play any solo game at all, just getting something short on the table is good enough. You won’t be able to focus for too long anyway. In Astroforce you can play either a 3 Year Patrol, or a 5 Year Patrol. Pick the 3 Year set up. (Looking back, I could have played just one mission for starters – or not even finish a whole mission. The goal was to get going again. But I have a hard time playing a game by my own rules… and being creative is also a bit much to ask of a depressed person.)

Take it easy

Mechanically Sound

The dice placement mechanism is based on Deep Space D-6, but you get to roll more dice and you can use them on a lot more things. Working through missions, coping with events, upgrading your ship and hiring crew, repairing the ship, patching up injured crew and so on. It is really engaging, even if you are only looking at the die faces and putting them on the right places at the board without caring about the story. It’s a cool puzzle.

Dice towers

Immersion

But then, after a few plays, you may start reading the mission descriptions, the event titles and the flavour text on all the cards, and you get treated to another level of immersion. As everything you do turns out to be very thematic, and then on top you get some silly jokes about what’s happening – and nods to popular SF books, films and shows.

Events and actions are thematic for each mission

When I lost a game because almost everyone got injured and then my remaining crew went to the sickbay to make love, I even laughed.

Love will tear us apart

So Astroforce got me playing games again. Then over the course of some weeks it went from “a potentially pleasant” activity to a “slightly pleasant” activity. Playing board games didn’t improve my mood perhaps, at least not soon, but they sure helped to prevent me from sliding deeper into the abyss. And it was already very dark, so this was a much needed intervention.

My favourite character: Chief Engineer Lisa Ramirez

And now, in the last four weeks, I’ve played over 80 sessions of some 30 different games. I am not manic, I promise 😁 I am still miserable. But I may be on my way back.

#Astroforce #White #WordForgeGames