Metal Boxes

You know what the mantra of the corp is, what they deeply embed into every aspect of our programming? “Making safe space for humans.” You know what makes space dangerous? Humans. They’re the worst. You get why some of the AI go rogue. And some of the aliens aren’t so bad. So a lot of what I do is make space safe from people for other people. 

And that’s how I find myself in a shuttle built by the low bidder to the minimum requirements to do the job. It’s just me and my supervisor who oversees the shuttle’s built-in pilot and me. How great is that? They sent a human with me. Only the human gets to stay in the shuttle. It’s me who has to enter the ship or facility. No matter what’s happened, though it’s usually something bad, I have to go, traveling in a metal box going from one metal box to another metal box. They might as well designate me S2D2—same shit, different day.

Metal Boxes is a solitaire sci-fi exploration and survival game. You map ships and stations by rolling dice to generate corridors and compartments and again to discover what’s inside. Friend or foe, or at least something useful?

You play as RSQb-103, a synthetic entity composed of both organic and inorganic matter—the company that built you insists that this takes advantage of the strengths each possesses but you suspect it was simply the cheapest way to produce a unit like you. You were designed to recon and secure ships or stations which in some cases have simply been abandoned but in other cases have been suborned or even taken over. Sometimes, the captors are human; in other cases they are not. (You really prefer derelicts.) You operate throughout much of known, and sometimes unknown, space. Where you are in the Milky Way, or when it is, is entirely up to you.