Space Gits First Impressions

This article is covering my experience with Space Gits after 3 games and teaching half a dozen people. It’s not a full review as I’ve not explored enough of the game to do that. So I’m going to talk about what I like, what I’m unsure about, and some tips for getting the most out of the game.

What is Space Gits?

Dice stacking at the Nova Open

Space Gits by Mike Hutchinson at Planet Smasher Games. He has published a number of games but is best known for post apocalyptic racing game Gaslands. Gaslands is a game I’ve never gotten into but it really popped off for an indie war game, and I can see the same vein of creativity that Mike has brought to both projects.

Space Gits is a game about drunken space orcs brawling. It’s quite unlike any miniatures game I’ve ever played as it relies heavily on dexterity. Dexterity-based board games have become increasingly common but it’s relatively unexplored space in minis games. In Space Gits you move or shoot by rolling dice on the table, but where they land determines where you move or shoot.

Dexterity and playing with dice doesn’t stop there, when a git activates they finish their turn taking a swig, putting a die touching their base. If there is already one you stack the new one on top. When your git moves you have to move the dice with them, and not knock them over. This is pretty easy, but damage to your gits adds dice to this tower. It’s not uncommon to have to add 10 dice to your tower from one attack.

When your dice tower falls the git also goes down. One of your friendly models can get to them and put the boot in them to get them back up, with no dice tower. This all works very well, the core of the game is really the tension and drama of seeing if you can stack that 13th die, or if you can successfully move your model with 10 dice next to it.

I’ve not touched on how the game ends and how you win. When you start the game you set a 30 minute timer, at the end of thirty minutes orcs can no longer stand up if they’ve been knocked down, and you play till only one player is in action. You win by gathering the most caps (bottlecaps) which are dropped on the table at the start of the game, much as in Moonstone.

Last I need to touch on melee combat, the game uses Rock, Paper, Scissors for close combat. Well, not exactly, it uses Thump, Shove, Punch. Whichever of those three wins the round of combat determines what the result is. Thump deals damage, shove moves the enemy away from you and out of combat, and pinch steals one of their caps. Importantly, outside of Shove winning you keep playing until a git falls over or someone is shoved out of combat.

How Does it Play?

Dice stacking at the Jersey Shore

Pretty great! The game is fast moving. Early on players can focus on picking up dropped caps, before moving into more focused fighting. This is not a game that wants much terrain, it plays on a 2x2’ board and just some light scatter will be fine.

You can’t fully control your unit’s movement and a lot of the game flow relies on that. You’ll have turns where you don’t go where you want, often wasting a turn. But you’ll have turns where something unexpected but positive happens, one game my friend was trying to charge me with a Gnawball (squig) but missed. He then realized that the Gnawball could instead go stand up his Clankbot (Killa Kan) which was objectively the stronger play. And it’s great to have that kind of possibility space in a minis game. Typically a failure doesn’t result in an interesting new game state, but here it can.

The game’s 30 minute timer is also a great way to keep things contained. A little more on this below but it does work well and lets the games feel like they have a beginning (picking up caps), a middle (fighting), and an end (cheese it, the fuzz!)

Mike also deserves credit for coming up with a game that is easy to pick up. Playing with some folks very experienced with minis games, and some pretty new to them, everyone picked up the rules quickly. Aside from a few more complicated special rules there were very few questions.

Behold, my stuff

Room for Improvement

The first problem is mostly tied to teaching new people the game. The 30 minute timer goes by quite fast. And that’s not a problem, what is a problem, especially with new players, is you can go into the end phase without a lot of dice on models. You really want most models to be down or have a decent number of dice on them before the 30 minute timer hits, to make sure the end phase isn’t too long. With new players that doesn’t happen because early turns took longer.

Edit: Turns out I was playing with an earlier version of the end game rules. The game now has a better end condition. You roll d6 at the end of each turn once you’ve hit the end. If you roll 3 of the same result the game ends. This will typically happen after 3-5 turns.

There are a few areas where I think the game can struggle. The first one I’ll note is that Rock/Paper/Scissors works best when each player has the full range of actions open to them. Often you don’t want to throw or win with Shove. When you charge into an enemy if you shove them, often you’ve just undone your turn. This makes it pretty consistent that the charger will be throwing Thump or Pinch at first which isn’t great. I think everyone when learning this game will at some point throw a shove, win and then be disappointed.

Along a similar note, while I love that the game has a RPS mechanic, it can drag a little bit. When you both throw rock three times in a row there is some tension, but that tension doesn’t match the highs of some of the dexterity parts of the game.

Lastly, another small issue with the game is that melee-only characters kinda stink. I’m not sure how they are balance-wise, but they’re not much fun to play. The core issue is that there are three actions: Shoot, Scoot, and Boot. Melee-only models can only do 2 of the 3, and you often don’t have a chance to Boot, meaning that many, or maybe most turns they’re taking one fewer actions than most models. This isn’t a huge issue when building models for the game, just try and include that pistol, but if you have existing orc models and want to play WYSIWYG it’s an issue.

Tips for New Players

Keep it simple - as I said above the first 30 minutes goes fast. For people’s first games I’d avoid any of the more exotic guns, just stick to basic shooting profiles and aim for 4 models per player. This does bump into rule of cool some, but I think the end result is better if the first game moves fast and teaches players the core mechanics.

Decide how stupid you want your dice to be - I think the game is most fun when you have dozens of different styles of dice. This will make it more confusing. The game is clearer if you use only a single style of dice to stack damage, and other styles of d6 are used for movement and shooting. But I like having a mix, we had some stone dice, some matte dice, some tiny dice, some dice shaped like rocket ships. Having the mix makes the game wackier and more fun.

Police dice on and near the board - Be sure to pick up dice after they’re used, don’t let them sit around, it will confuse movement and shooting.

Get a laser line - Space Gits is a very fun, free-form game. It’s not designed to be played down to the millimeter. However, having a laser line you can use will just speed things up. You need to do a lot of movement and shooting based on dice, having one of these handy will speed up action resolution.

Match the vibe - the theme of the game is drunk space orcs. Crack a few brews, have some laughs, never argue over measurements.

A three-way fight in Space Gits

What’s Next?

I’m looking forward to getting the physical rule book from the Kickstarter. The rules for both campaigns and vehicles are exciting. I don’t see wanting to run a weeks long campaign of Space Gits but having an ongoing low-key campaign would be fun, or doing a one-day event. Once the game is fully out I want to host a one day event where people make gangs, and we play 3-5 games using the campaign system.

The vehicle rules are also exciting, I think they ask a little more from players, a lot is going on with them so it really takes the game up from super light to slightly crunchy. I suspect that’s worth it but they’re lower on my priority list.

But I see Space Gits as a great game for downtime between more serious (and longer) games, with people new to minis, or when having a few drinks at the end of a day. I plan to introduce it to more people and look forward to that.

I’m also working on a list builder I hope to release soon-ish, watch this space for more on that.