For centuries, we have been living in utopia, harvesting energy directly from the Sun.
We have built up a vast lattice of solar harvesting infrastructure that feeds our worlds and provides for everything we could need or imagine.
In recent years there have been massive solar flares and unprecedented solar instability that have destroyed our harvesting infrastructure and cast our planets into darkness.
These events have revealed that our star has become dangerously unstable, to the point where it could go supernova at any moment. Panic and chaos are spreading throughout our worlds. For many, this is End Times.
Yet there is one small glimmer of hope. Each of our planets has built an Ark to house some fraction of its population chosen to survive. These Arks wait poised at the edge of the solar system, ready to escape, but they require a great deal of energy to attain the momentum needed to flee our solar system. It was a stark realization: the only source of such vast energy is from the dying star itself.
The urgent task we now face is to rebuild just enough of the shattered solar harvesting infrastructure to harness the energy needed to propel our Arks out of the solar system- before the Sun goes supernova and consumes everything we know.
Sol: Last Days of a Star is a board game for two to five players where each player represents a different planetary effort to transmit as much energy from the Sun back to their Ark as they can to escape the solar system before the Sun explodes!
The board represents the solar environment: two layers of orbit around the Sun (Upper and Lower Orbit), and three layers within the Sun itself (the Convective, Radiative, and Core).
The deeper you go, the higher your rewards, but the faster the instability of the Sun is increased.
Your Mothership rotates slowly in orbit around the Sun, and this is the only place your ships can launch from to perform useful tasks in the solar environment.
You can either convert ships into stations or use the ships to activate yours and other players' stations.
If you activate your own stations you get the full reward, while activating other player's stations you split the reward with the owner.
You gain energy by activating Harvest stations, and you use this energy to either activate Build stations to build new ships (which you need since you are constantly losing ships by converting them into new stations) or activate Transmit stations to transmit the energy back to your Ark to turn into Momentum (which is ultimately how your Ark will escape).
But you cannot enter the Sun without converting ships into solar Bridges which span the high energy membranes separating one layer from the next.
You must carefully manage your time and resources in order to transmit the most energy back to your Ark before the Sun is lost forever. With any luck, some small collection of your last planetary residents will escape the solar system before it is engulfed by the oncoming supernova!
