# Lost Ship *Created:* 2026-11-10, *Modified:* 2026-11-10 ![[Lost Ship (cover).jpg]] **Lost Ship** puts you in the chair of an executive officer who has to keep forty thousand people alive across half a galaxy with a clipboard and a dwindling parts bin. It is a survival game played on one log sheet, and the sheet is the whole tragedy: fuel, parts, six systems, six scouts, and the names of the pilots you are going to lose. ## Setting Your civilization's great migration had only just begun when the lead colony ship exploded, taking half the fleet with it in a chain of fire. Your captain did not wait for the astrogators to plot a course — she ordered the Leap Drive engaged, and you went. Now you are half a galaxy from the fleet, under unfamiliar skies, with no way back and no way of knowing whether there is a fleet to return to. You press on alone in search of a planet to call your own. The book's whole premise fits in one sentence: "You will find it or die." The ship is an Empathy-class colony ship, near-self-sufficient, carrying 40,000 colonists through years of galactic dark. Travel runs on a **Gaussian Leap Drive**, twin magnets that rip holes in space — elegant, and hungry for fuel you no longer have. With the fleet there were fuelling ships and battleships; now there is a mining laser to strip fuel from uninhabitable rock and Curiosity-class scouts that can double as fighters if it comes to that. And it does come to that. The only other thing out here is the enemy: slow, ugly, heavily armed and badly aimed, in three hulls the pilots have nicknamed **Mark I**, **Mark II** and **Mark III**. The one advantage you have is that their engines are wasteful — outlast their opening volley and they run dry, and your pilots can finish them at leisure. The aliens respond to all peaceful communication with hostility, and the book's anthropology of them is two lines long and entirely military, which is the point: nobody aboard knows anything about them except how to kill them. ## Mechanics A journey is a series of leaps, and every leap runs the same seven moments: **leap into system**, **assess threat**, **fight if necessary**, **search the wreckage**, **scan the system**, **make repairs and bury your dead**, **leap again**. ### The Leap and the Threat Leaping costs a point of fuel and adds a tally to "leaps since incident". Then roll on the threat table, and the table tightens as you go deeper: 2d6−3 on the first leap, 2d6−2 on the second, 2d6−1 on the third, straight 2d6 for leaps four through seven, and +1 for every leap after that. Low rolls are nothing, then a Mark I or two, then cruisers, then battleships. Roll 15 or better and you have found the alien home sector — two Mark IIIs, two Mark IIs and two Mark Is all at once — and if you beat that, you take their home as your own and the journey is over. ### Combat Your scouts shoot first, always. Roll 1d6 per scout: 5 does 1 damage, 6 does 2. You choose which enemy hull takes each hit but cannot split one hit between two ships. Mark Is have 2 hit points, Mark IIs 5, Mark IIIs 8. Kills are the pilot's resumé. A Mark I is one kill, while landing the final blow on a Mark II or III counts as two or three. Three kills makes a **veteran** (+1 to every attack roll); six makes an **ace** (+2). Then every surviving enemy gun fires, hitting on 4, 5 or 6 — and Mark IIs fire twice while Mark IIIs fire four times. Where the damage lands is rolled on a targeting table (1d6 in the first round, 2d6 afterwards): superficial damage, one of the scout positions, or the hull and its six systems. Scout damage is its own d6 table — pilot injured, pilot killed, scout at 50%, scout inoperable, scout destroyed with the pilot in it. The **mining laser** joins in from round two, a d6 gun doing 1 damage on a 4 or 5 and 2 on a 6, and it upgrades itself automatically once it has recorded five kills. This is the round where the enemy closes with the colony ship and starts taking the ship apart. **Systems** degrade in thirds: 100% to 66% to 33% to inoperable, and the damage table is where the design is at its most quietly cruel. At 33% a scout bay launches two scouts instead of six, a sick bay leaves newly injured pilots out for three leaps, sensors roll 2d6−2 to scan. At inoperable, the hull is gone, the engines cannot leap, and newly injured pilots simply die. Salvation is that exhaustion is on your side: Mark Is run out of fuel at the end of round three, Mark IIs after round four, Mark IIIs after round five. ### Between Battles - **Wreckage** yields parts on a d6 table, with a bonus of +1 if you fought a Mark II and +2 for a Mark III. - **The system scan** is 2d6, penalised early and bonused late: barren rock, fuel, an anomaly, or home. - **Fuel** is stripped from worlds with the mining laser — and every point of fuel found carries a **B-Score**: roll a d6 per fuel for the estimated billions of sentient lives extinguished to get it. It is tallied at the end of the game, and the book's suggestion for an X.O. who cannot live with the number is to tear up the log sheet and resign, for which they will be executed for cowardice. - **Anomalies** (2d6) are the game's wild card: space madness takes a pilot, an airlock mishap costs three parts, an ion storm damages a system — and a 12, *Back From the Dead*, returns a dead pilot alive, with their scout if they died in it. - **Repairs** cost parts: one for an inoperable scout, one per point of hull, two to bring a damaged system back to full, four to upgrade a system, six to build a new scout. You may scrap a scout for four parts in a pinch. Every fifth leap, one upgrade is free. ### Journey's End If the hull gives out, the ship is destroyed. If you are stranded without fuel or working engines, the captain spares the colonists a slow death under an unknown sun and vents the airlocks. At any other time you may lobby for the same: roll 1d6, +1 for each inoperable system, and on a 6 she agrees to self-destruct. Anything lower and she insists you press on. ## Editions **Lost Ship** is at v3.27.20, a 22-page survival game self-published by W.M. Akers in 2020, funded on Kickstarter that spring by 816 backers. It is a single edition; the library holds the core book, a spreads-layout copy of the same file for reading on screen, and the quick reference. *In the library.* Akers came back to the long dark between stars with [[Letters to the Stars - An Epistolary RPG|Letters to the Stars]], which makes the letter the unit of play where this one makes it the log sheet. The cover art is E.L. Trouvelot's 1881–82 astronomical illustrations, courtesy of the Brooklyn Public Library — the same public-domain sky the designer drew on for the rulebook's look. The crew roster at the back, "Legends of the 40,000," is the Kickstarter's backers listed by name and occupation: *Feline Wrangler*, *Foil Hat Engineer*, *Pigeonhunter*, *Major General Disappointment*. ## Supplements - **Quick Reference** — the play aid for the table: the threat, targeting, damage, anomaly and system-damage tables on a couple of pages, so the X.O.'s log sheet can stay the only thing being written on. ## References - [Lost Ship - Akers Games](https://akersgames.com/shop/p/lost-ship-a-survival-game) — the designer's store page: the PDF, the softcover, and his own framing of the game as *Battlestar Galactica* crossed with *B-17: Queen of the Skies*. - [Lost Ship: A Survival Game - DriveThruRPG](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/302647/Lost-Ship-A-Survival-Game) — the product listing, with a player review from 2024 on the difficulty of the sequence of play. - [Lost Ship - Kickstarter](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/wmakers/lost-ship-a-survival-game) — the 2020 campaign and its updates, including the final layout notes. - [Lost Ship - wmakers.net](http://wmakers.net/lostship) — the designer's own page for the game, where the quick reference is a free download. Coverage of **Lost Ship** is thin: a handful of purchaser reviews and the campaign itself, and no reviews or actual plays of the kind the game deserves.