Oh, boy. This post marks the end of an era – me and Kinpatsusamurai spent about half a year running a co-op campaign of Space Station Zero by Snarling Badger Studios, using Star Trek as a sort of background and backdrop for the campaign. The explorer crew of the Miranda-class U.S.S. Oceanides and the battle-hardened crew of the Defiant-class U.S.S. Stalwart pushed their way farther down into Space Station Zero, into a weird, Star-Wars-Cantina-esque bar and then finally down into a reactor chamber that finally proved too much for our crews to handle. When they reached [REDACTED], the final boss of the Space Station Zero game, that was about all she wrote.

First, on top of everything else, I have to say that Kinpatsusamurai pulled out all the stops in terms of the environments for the last stretch of our campaign, especially as far as the “bar” level went. The glowing panels looked brilliant and really added gravitas to one of our campaign’s last, big brawls. It also gave me an excuse to bust out my recently-painted Gellerpox Infected, since we’d previously featured some of KS’s Poxwalkers as villains in our environment anyways. Maybe it’s not terribly Star-Trek-a-propos but it’s Space Station Zero, and anything can happen here.

With our friend Gerard spectating, when we got to the reactor room, we had a hell of a time with a challenge that required 20 successes to disable the reactor in the scope of five turns, where the “life” checks that we were making got progressively harder as the room took on more and more radiation. Everything we did, we did to try and prioritize characters with high intelligence getting to roll and try to disable the reactor, and popped every special ability we could think of to swing this in our favor. In the end, regrettably, it wasn’t enough – we failed by 1. We achieved 19 successes, and fell just one short of stopping the reactor from going critical.

In the resulting blast, only KS’s Andorian first officer (the MVP of the campaign by leaps and bounds) and my Chief Engineer (mid at best) were left alive, and it was only they that would move on to the mysterious final boss of the campaign, [REDACTED]. They had taken on a monstrous new form, an armor-laden Rhinoceros creature, which might not have been totally fitting but KS had just painted it, we loved it, and it looked great. Our friend Gerard took over rolling for the final boss, and we went in guns a-blazing and gave it our best shot.

Needless to say we were flattened – but it was a fantastic flattening. It was a bittersweet end to the adventure but I don’t think for a moment it will be our last venture into Space Station Zero – especially since I’ve been working on a Kill Team of Blood Ravens for a while, and between those and KS’s hosts of marines, chaos marines, and Custodes, we definitely have the miniatures to make a 40k-based run out of this next. Before we get there, though, and before I finish painting up my Blood Ravens, there’s some other pieces that have been on my bench that I wanted to get settled first, and another game we wanted to start to pivot into for a while. More on that to follow!