Snakes on a Spaceship

I went to Amsterdam for a week instead of attending our regular gaming session but I was given a quick rundown of what happened after our ship's alarms went off.

Apparently, the incoming ships were some form of 3 small fighters from the ACRE Corporation that demanded the return of stolen merchandise. They threatened to board our ship so we engaged them in combat. I'm told that starship combat is quite dangerous and after several hits, we decided to play dead, let them board us and fight hand-to-hand.

I do not come in peace

A single pilot came on board our ship looking for Donald Watson. He didn't believe us when told that no such individual is part of our crew. He identified Cole as the person he was looking for, who quickly made a break for the fighter ship but was stopped by a single arm swipe. After a few hits from an axe and some fireballs being thrown at him, we realised this guy was an android. He didn't last long Cole pulled a single critical wire our of the back of its neck just before Jokkenson chopped its head right off.

Shortly after, it came to light that this android wasn't a seperate entity from its ship so Jokkenson charged into the fighter docked to our ship only to see the last surviving fighter disappear into the distance.

The fighter began a countdown type sequence in the meantime.
Our sessions keep ending on cliffhangers!

We start this session trying to figure out what to do with a fighter ship attached to our ship that might be counting down to self-destruct. As players, we're not ones to back down on a challenge so it's only natural we would attempt to override the fighter's system to stop the self-destruct sequence.

Cole and Cyrus were elected to plug themselves into the fighter's system and hack their way through to the control core. Their consciousnesses found themselves in a white corridor with buttons numbered 1 to 10. While some of the buttons did nothing and pushing them only wasted time before the denotation would trigger, one offered a ladder leading up to a similar corridor with numbered buttons. A similar selection of numbers through guesswork allowed them to find another ladder, which they took but at one point Cole pressed a button that opened a trap door underneath him that transported him back a few levels. It's around this point that they realised they were in some form of Snakes & Ladders puzzle.

It's that sort of game, all right

Cole's player succesfully rolled for the use of his Unique Gift Focus which allowed him to recall trivia with uncanny accuracy. The Game Master ruled this would allow him, as a player, to search for the board online... so everyone at the table took out their phones, did an image search and compared notes to the several different boards that we found. It was great seeing everyone work in tandem to figure out this puzzle thrown at us.

Meanwhile, Ian tried to establish communications with codename Bob's ship to check on their status. As he lacks the necessary skills to attempt the task, I had some fun roleplaying his inability to make sense of the controls that Cyrus usually uses. We've learned that Bob's ship took some heavy damage and he clearly wasn't in the mood for small talk while he was dealing with the damage caused by the fighters' attacks.

Only a few seconds were left before the fighter ship would self-destruct. While Cyrus and Cole were hacking away in virtual reality, Yannick was working on a way to seal the explosion and minimise the damage while Jokkenson stood on the ready holding a rope tied to our two programming specialists. Soon after Cyrus entered the last sequence which deactivated the self-destruct routine, Jokkenson pulled on the rope, ejecting them both from the ship and its system. We found out they were successful only after the lack of the expected explosion.

In the ensuing calm, we contacted Bob's ship once more with the offer to sell him the fully functional fighter. Although keeping the ship was a tempting prospect, logistically it offered too many issues to be a viable option. We gained some credits after a lengthy negotiation over its price and handed it over to Bob... but not before we made a copy of the data the ship's systems held.