Sunbreach

Sunbreach is a turn-based space tactics game about taking ships instead of breaking them. You have no gun. You have a winch, a welder, an EMP and a boarding pod — so every fight is a robbery: read the convoy's momentum, put its systems below the line, and hold on for two turns while the escort works out where you went. Both sides give their orders blind and one physics pass resolves them together, so nothing is decided by a die roll and nothing is decided by who moved first.

How to play

1. Fly your sortie group out from the parked Ember. The sector starts dark and things resolve out of it by heat — warm wrecks are obvious, cold hulks make you nose into the drift.
2. Fly onto a resolved contact and engage it. Blunder into a patrol ring instead and the battle opens on their terms.
3. In battle, both sides plan blind and commit. One integrator then resolves everything in a fixed, published order, so you can always work out what is about to happen.
4. Tap one of your hulls, then tap inside its circle to steer. The circle sits on your DRIFT POINT, not on your ship — how much you can change your situation never varies, but where you are changing it from runs away from you.
5. A laden freighter cannot stop and cannot turn. Read where it will be, not where it is.
6. Arm the EMP and put the prize's systems below the line. Disabled is boardable — and it claws those systems back every turn, so keep hitting it.
7. Latch the boarding pod on and hold for two turns. Break the hull instead and all you get is scrap worth 40% of it.
8. Enemy stores are never a number, only a band: class capacity minus what you actually saw them spend. The band can be wrong, and the game will tell you when it was.

Tips & strategy

• Preview is the real resolve function with the apply switch off, so it can never lie to you. What it cannot show is whether the enemy dodges — that is their order, made at the same moment as yours.
• The garrison never fires through its own hull. A pod latched onto the freighter is standing behind 260 metres of cover.
• The garrison reads the same estimates you do. Look spent, and it will believe you.
• Every burn costs both ledgers: mass is the propellant you throw, energy is the work of throwing it. Mass never comes back.
• Nobody dies. The worst thing that happens to a crew is the capsule getting thrown off the field.

Frequently asked questions

Is there any dice or hit chance?

None. There is no outcome randomness anywhere in Sunbreach — every effect is computable from the board. Skill is positioning, sequencing and reading telegraphs. Both sides ordering at the same time is imperfect information, not chance: give the engine the same two order sets and it produces the same result every time.

Why can't I just shoot the freighter?

You can, and it is the losing move. Killing a hull leaves scrap worth about 40% of it; capturing leaves you the hull. The whole arsenal splits along that line, so every loadout choice is an economic one.

Do I move first or does the enemy?

Neither. Both sides commit blind and a single pass resolves them together, in a fixed order that is published in the rules. That is also why the same engine can run asynchronous multiplayer later: two submitted turns, one resolve.

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