You need to be certified to even start to play this game

The initial release of Sixty Years in Space into early access remains the complete game I wanted to make. Each of the subsequent updates is a step on the road to making it simpler and cleaner by streamlining the process of playing it and removing the number of special case rules in doing so. And yet it remains... complex, to say the least.

I've talked previously about how I want the process of reading the rules to be part of playing the game. And as part of that, one of the things I've been threatening to do for a while is to get players to actually complete certifications for reading the rules that would some how end up being part of the game.

While I was working on update 2, I realised I could simplify a lot of special cases spread throughout the rules by allowing certifications to act as chrome. If you have chrome when you perform an action, you roll 1D6 less (Sixty Years in Space is a roll-under game system), and you can get chrome in various ways. But there was always a baseline of things that I'd like to have included: the crew module, the starting equipment, and so on, which were just special cases sitting in the rules.

Awkwardly, I removed the special cases from update 2 without including a replacement mechanism. Well, here it is. Four certificates for your crew that you can use to improve their chances in the game - three dependent on the quality of the crew, and one for the crew module itself. These certificates are free to download and print for use with the Sixty Years in Space game.

PS: Observant players may have noticed the phrase "Emailware" in use throughout the rules. This harkens back to "Postcardware" where you could fund the progress of a game like Ancient Dungeons of Mystery by sending the creator a postcard. Try sending me an email as indicated in the rules and see what rewards you might reap.