by Mike Clarke
It’s not often you come across a game that’s such a joy to play — that takes you back to the days where you and your friends faced off across a board with a game you all knew well for a wild contest of one-upmanship with no quarter asked and none given.
Xia: Legends of a Drift System is a go-anywhere, do-anything, sandbox-style adventure that brings back those heady days of oh-so-playable games where you didn’t think about rules. You just played the game.
That’s Xia. It’s easy to learn. Its game play is intuitive. After a few sessions, you don’t need to keep looking things up.
In Xia , you’re the lowly captain of a bargain basement space scow with “brown nylon interior, low-muck, brown flooring and Humkar leather crew seats.”
Unless, of course, instead of the Swamp Rat, you pulled the Numerator, a former lifeboat for the Queen Mary XVIII with the nice white vinyl interior and metal grating on the floors.
Ignoring the faint smell of urine and cheap wine, you take the controls and power up the FTL drives. You grin as you prepare to leave behind your old life as an accountant in one of Kemplar II’s minor principalities for a new life of danger and adventure in the largely unexplored and unpredictable post apocalyptic drift system known as Xia — the only drift system in the galaxy stable enough to support the civilizations that nearly blew it to hell more than 400 years ago.
Now I made up that narrative. But it was inspired by the back of a couple of the ship cards and some of the history contained in the rule book. Not bad for a game that one reviewer described as dry as toast and wondered whether it needed an event deck to spice it up.