Meeple Station wants to be Rimworld on a space station

New management and building game Meeple Station has a coolpremise for those who’ve sunk hundreds of hours into colony builders like Dwarf Fortress and Rimworld: space stations. (It’s me, for the record. I’ve sunk the hundreds of hours in.) Meeple Station is a new game from Regions of Ruin developers Vox Games and released into Early Access this week. In it, players manage a space station from nothing to thriving enterprise by mining, trading, growing hydroponic crops, generating power and life support, and exploring uncharted star systems.

Its developers describe it as “an open-ended space station simulator in the vein of Rimworld.” At present it has “around 20%” of its complete content, but some of the promised material is a doozy: Like a co-op mode scheduled to become available as an alpha in March. According to the developers, it already works. That’s a holy grail for colony builder fans, and something that has never been done successfully with the genre.

I spent a few hours with the game and fighting off pirate raids and trading are both fun, as is building the station, though there’s not a ton more to the game right now than that. Scrounging up goods to trade is pretty neat, but so far my favorite thing is definitely space-squids, which will murder you and everything you love. Upcoming content, like building your own trade ships for expeditions and more aliens for your crew seem very promising—and this is a developer delivered its previous Early Access game, mind you.

You can find Meeple Station on Steam or its official website.

Really, I think I can’t help but be charmed by this one because it uses the word meeple, tabletop slang for little wooden pawn people. (See here for an extended love letter to those things.)

Jon Bolding is a games writer and critic with an extensive background in strategy games. When he's not on his PC, he can be found playing every tabletop game under the sun.