Hard Wired Island is my new favorite game! it's a tabletop made by Paul Matijevic, Freyja Erlingsdottr, and Minerva McJanda set on a super cool space station in 2020 (that's so far away!) where companies care more about making money than making sure people can live! You and your buddies play as a group of ruffians screwed over by everyone else, so you're in the perfect place to fight back! You can even kiss cute girls along the way ^_^

Grand Cross Station

Grand Cross Station is where everything in Hard Wired Island takes place! It's a huuuuuge space station that was made back in 2010 and it holds more than four and a half MILLION people! That's bigger than Boston! It's in a special spot in Earth's orbit called L5, where the earth and moon's gravity is balanced juuust right to keep it from falling back to earth, crashing into the moon, or flying away into space! It's almost self-sufficient, with a ring of agriculture pods for growing food, but they still need to harvest water from ice comets and get shipments from earth and luna (their name for the moon).
The station has fifteen wards along its three ground panels, totaling up to about 125 square miles, around the size of Philadelphia! I couldn't really get a good picture of what Grand Cross looks like, so here's a really cool one that's kinda similar:

Humans and androids live together in (kinda) harmony in Grand Cross, and they're super friendly to people like me too! There are HRT regulators that you can get as augments (more on those later) so you don't have to remember to take your pills, and places like Marsha Stretch and the Athos District for queer folks to hang out! I also really like the Amal ward, which is designed to be covered in super pretty greenery and have tons of open spaces! I love multi-level cities and stuff, they're so cool and pretty and feel so comfy! Amal has tons of neat tech stuff too. Speaking of which...

Technology

There's TOOONS of cool gadgets and tech things in the game! There's your usual computers and laptops and cell phones everything, but there's even cell phones that don't have keypads or buttons - they have a touchscreen across the front like a really small PDA! You can use these for what the game calls "gig apps", where you can do a bit of work when you've got spare time to get money! It seems like you should be getting more for what you do and it takes up a lot of time, though...

There are also drones and androids in the game! Drones are little machines that you can remote control to fly around and do stuff for you, and androids are people made of wires and metal instead of blood and flesh! Androids have a few problems going on, like how androids can't choose to have a baby on their own since they're manufactured instead of born, but they seem really cool! They get to have body augments and such without having to worry about it costing too much money. I wish I was an android too ^.^

If you both wanna be a human and have cool tech in your body, you can get augments! Augments are cybernetic add-ons that can either make you look super cool, deal with a medical problem, or help you be better at stuff like a job or your in-game activities. Cat ears and glowy skin patterns and hormone regulators are some of the more common cosmetic augments, and of course arms and legs and such are some of the most common medical augments. You can even have your whole body (except for your brain) replaced by cybernetics!

There's also this cool thing called a Shard Card, where you can plug it into a special computer with a keyboard and monitor and it'll pull up your own PC, no matter where you are! It's super helpful for hacking and stuff, since it means you can connect your computer right up to the network you're targeting without having to lug it around! I wonder if anyone's tried to make that in real life, it sounds super cool! There's also these weird things called Dreamers, but I'm not sure wha??©t they’re tryi£½ng to▀???? —???? GæØ¢Ã ▀ ¶??©. (Out-of-kayfabe note: hover for a readable version! I've tried to make it friendly to screen-readers as well, so please let me know if it hasn't worked!)

Playing Hard Wired Island

Of course, a tabletop game isn't very helpful if it doesn't tell you how to play! Hard Wired Island works with standard six-sided dice (us nerds call them D6'es) that you roll for different actions, like bulls***ing someone (the game's term, not mine) or hacking into a network or showing off how much you know about topics like "Astronautics", "Games", "Online Communities", "Transhuman Subculture", and more! (There are a couple I still don't understand, though - does anyone else know what a "VTuber" is?)

Therea are different origins and traits your character can have too, so you could make an android hacker who's a regular at the Book Club Cafe in Jinxing District, or a thief who helped build Grand Cross and was famous on the internet for a little while! The way you design your character affects their "burden", which is a representation of how hard life is for you economically. A burden of 0 means you're living pretty comfortably, but a burden of 4 means you probably can't even afford a place to live, which sucks! Why do people have to pay money to have a home?

There's a really cool social interaction system in the game, where how you act affects the mood and changes how you can act going forward! Hacking is built around the same system, so there's just one mechanic you have to learn to do them both instead of having a random other minigame in the mix. Actual fighting is a last resort, so you gotta focus on other stuff first! There's a big focus on telling a story over just crunching numbers, which is really nice for me.

Hard Wired Island is really great, and I really hope everyone will enjoy it as much as I do! You can buy it here:

I really wanna get a group for this together, but after what happend last time, I'm gonna be more careful. Only folks who I trust can join, ok? Sign my guest book below with your AIM if you're interested and we can get planning! See ya later!~ -Lemma