Xenograd

Your station. Their rules.

Xenograd is a space station management sim. You run a rotating station built from doughnut-shaped rings, three levels each, and decide what goes in every zone: ports, crew quarters, noodle bars, farms, temples, embassies. Twelve alien species decide whether they like it.

Build in rings

• Grow the station. Add new doughnuts at either end, or buy the abandoned derelicts that drift past and attach them, once you've cleared out whatever lives inside.

• Zone every level. Port, Crew, Industrial, Agricultural, Entertainment, Relaxation, Resort, Urban, Spiritual and Diplomatic zones, each with its own buildings.

• Choose the air. Oxygen, methane or helium, zone by zone. Aliens in foreign air pull on helmets and grumble, and walls with airlocks keep the atmospheres apart.

• More than 200 buildings, from capsule hotels and cantinas to quasar spas, opera halls, spawning pools and the Hall of Arguments.

Twelve species, twelve sets of demands

Every species breathes, eats, relaxes and worships in its own way. The Sylph expect to be pampered and hate the bottom deck. The Champilions make the best security in the galaxy. The Gizmorites want something to tinker with. The X-900s just want to build more X-900s.

Hire them as staff, let happy visitors settle as residents, and raise their children through school. When thirty of a people are aboard, they petition for a community zone of their own, with buildings found nowhere else.

Keep the lights on

• Industry. Mine ore and ice, run factories, chemical plants and smelters, and keep drones hauling boxes where they're needed.

• Research. Study resources, prefabs and robots to work out new buildings, or improve the ones you have.

• Trade. Order from the supply ship, and play rival merchant factions against each other: buy their prefabs cheap, sell them dear to the next convoy.

• Reputation. Every visitor who leaves happy raises their species' opinion of your station. Every death aboard costs you 1,000 credits.

When things go wrong

• Outbreaks. The Purple Plague, parasites, and conditions like Stressball, where the patient swells up until they pop. Build medbays and surgeries, and staff them.

• Pirates. Raiders inbound: scramble fighter pilots, man the point defences, and fight off boarders. Capture pirates alive, and a prison sentence can turn them into honest visitors.

• Saboteurs. Spies, moles among your applicants, and Sand Candle zealots who arrive clean and build their bombs on board.

• The unexplained. Stray asteroids, and seven kinds of strange artefact that slow time, open portals, flood zones with the wrong air or shuffle your buildings around.

Campaign and free play

• A 15-mission campaign that brings in a new species or system each time: a pandemic, a sanctions-busting industrial race, a hive queen's breeding ground, a pirate-infested salvage yard, a summit of eight faiths, a diplomatic station for a galaxy at war.

• Free play with your own starting money, one to three doughnuts, and every calamity set from Never to Quadruple.