Social deduction is clearly as alive as it ever was. With releases big and small continuing to be released to clamouring hands waiting to receive them though, it is still difficult for a game to stand out within its genre. And stand out Stationfall does, which leaves the question if it's good. The pitch is good, so let's start there.

My teach for Stationfall starts with "good news, everybody; you're on a space station that crashing into Earth in about fifteen minutes". It's a pitch that grabs you by the scruff of your shirt and makes you sit upright - there's not a lot of time and there's stuff you've gotta do, how are you going to get it all done? You are then allowed to take control over literally all the characters on board the space station in order to work towards the goals of your secret character, who is hidden amongst the denizens of the space station, covertly working on what their own nefarious ends might be. You can also see those ends wrestled out from under you though by sheer happenstance as another player takes control of your guy and throws your helmet through an airlock. Which helps touch on some of the tensions in this game; it's really quite... Silly for just how big it is.

Let me frame that statement a little bit with an anecdote. The first thing you see when you open up the box is four rule books, two of which are as big as the box itself. That in itself has cost me about 80% of the players at my game night. You then work through all the components, and there's a million of them. You want to learn the game though, because you bought it so now people expect you to teach it, so you grab the biggest rulebook and start reading. The first thing you see is a page so densely filled with components, lists, pictures and diagrams that they both had to add a flap to the first page to make it all fit and use 4 point font. It's intimidating is what I'm trying to say.

However, I kind of knew what I was getting into. This game was released by Ion Games, after all; they felt fit to release Pax Renaissance with a rulebook that I still haven't emotionally recovered from. And honestly, the game isn't that hard to grok once you've gone through the reference guide all the way. Teaching it is also not actually that hard once you print out some excellent player reference sheets (check the files tab on Boardgamegeek) and you focus on the core of the game while letting players delve into the details while playing. And, hold onto the weird bit, around 80% of the rules just kind of work how you expect they will. You die in space without a helmet. Can't get bonked on the head in a protective suit. Things don't work when you break them. The space station is falling to Earth and we'll burn up in the atmosphere do you've GOT TO GO DO SOMETHING. And that's where gameplay comes in.

Turns in Stationfall tended to be either pretty snappy or really difficult, depending on how much the other players messed with your plan. You start be deciding if you want to reveal who you are (more on that later), if you want to influence a character in a kind of auction mechanic, and then you get to choose a character to do one or two actions with. Simple. Every character gets to basic things like walk, use a computer, bonk someone on the head or use a room for its special abilities. And you would do these things, essentially, to further towards your own secret goals. Now, I said earlier that this game gets rather silly, because it does - but in a good way. The things that Stationfall lets you do really are hilarious, or make you gasp out loud when you see another player actually release the giant monster in the station or use a giant space laser to blow up the police on Earth. It just gives you the toy box and says "have fun. Oh, we're leaving in fifteen minutes", forcing you to squeeze as much fun from the fun stone as you can. However, the real magic in this game is in the characters.

The game comes with just under thirty characters, at least twelve of which you'll use in a game (depending on player count). Some examples are the station's chief, a daredevil who wants to paraglide to Earth, a doctor with two distinct personality cards and thus can be controlled by two different players, a chimpanzee who wants shiny bits, a telepathic rat who needs to be carried around as an item, a security bot whose easiest way to score points is to just bonk people on the head and then plant a weapon on them afterwards, and a piece of living data that just wants to be copied to everyone. The cast here is excellent, and pretty much all of the characters are cool. They do cool things, their motivations are clear and their abilities work towards selling them as different humans. Which makes it all the better when you get to reveal as that one cool character that people have been accidentally helping all game.

Wait, this was a social deduction game, right?

Well, it is but it isn't? It's a social deduction game where the social deduction isn't the point. Figuring out who the other players are before they reveal themselves may be helpful, but it's not what the game is about. Plus, there is so much going on and there are so many agendas to keep track of that it's not something I personally bother with. Many characters have overlapping agendas in some sense (something I think is a good thing, as it helps create makeshift alliances through shared incentives) so it's quite difficult to accurately pin-point who someone has as their character before they reveal anyway. But again, the deduction isn't the point. Stationfall is much more similar to Archipelago than the Resistance in that way, where figuring out another player's motives is not how you win - it just helps you lose less. And, considering the scope of the game, I think that's a very wise choice.

So where does that leave us? I would personally only recommend a person into heavy games to buy this, especially if you're comfortable with something like a GMT manual or The Law of Root in order to learn a game. If you're a good teacher, you can absolutely play this with people who are not into heavy games so long as you don't bog them down with the details. The result of that is a game that's much less Battlestar Galactica, and much more Benny Hill by way of 2001: a Space Odyssey. You'll be sat around a table confused by what your friends are doing, occasionally frustrated by them throwing your plans into a dumpster only for you to salvage them again later, and absolutely blown away by how funny it is. It's an engine for hilarious mini stories to the point where purely winning starts to not be the main thing; it's also about seeing what ridiculous things this system will let you get away with.