New management and building game Meeple Station has a coolpremise for those who’ve sunk hundreds of hours into colony builders like Dwarf Fortress and Rimworld: space stations. (It’s me, for the record. I’ve sunk the hundreds of hours in.) Meeple Station is a new game from Regions of Ruin developers Vox Games and released into Early Access this week. In it, players manage a space station from nothing to thriving enterprise by mining, trading, growing hydroponic crops, generating power and life support, and exploring uncharted star systems.
Its developers describe it as “an open-ended space station simulator in the vein of Rimworld.” At present it has “around 20%” of its complete content, but some of the promised material is a doozy: Like a co-op mode scheduled to become available as an alpha in March. According to the developers, it already works. That’s a holy grail for colony builder fans, and something that has never been done successfully with the genre.
I spent a few hours with the game and fighting off pirate raids and trading are both fun, as is building the station, though there’s not a ton more to the game right now than that. Scrounging up goods to trade is pretty neat, but so far my favorite thing is definitely space-squids, which will murder you and everything you love. Upcoming content, like building your own trade ships for expeditions and more aliens for your crew seem very promising—and this is a developer delivered its previous Early Access game, mind you.
You can find Meeple Station on Steam or its official website.
Really, I think I can’t help but be charmed by this one because it uses the word meeple, tabletop slang for little wooden pawn people. (See here for an extended love letter to those things.)
