Citizen Sleeper: a gripping mash-up of board game and RPG

Gareth Damian Martin found a new way to tell a story in In Other Waters, presenting us with a luminous dashboard of buttons and scanners and radars to toy around with, then feeding a story through it. It was elegant, it was unusual and it worked - it made a big impression on me. Their new game Citizen Sleeper leaves a similar impression but it works rather differently.

Citizen Sleeper is a mixture of board game and role-playing game. The role-playing part is familiar: you experience a space station playing area through text, and there's a character sheet with skills you can improve as you level up. There are some eye-catching character illustrations to decorate it, and a simply rendered space station floating in the background, but it's mostly text and imagination that fuel the adventure.

Read more