Accessible cooperative rescue prototype

Silent Distress

A cooperative sci-fi rescue board game about finding the truth and getting out alive.

Silent Distress is a cooperative sci-fi rescue board game where your team boards a disabled ship, explores unknown rooms, manages failing systems, uncovers the disaster, and tries to escape before Suit Power runs out.

What is Silent Distress?

Your rescue team answers a distress signal and boards a silent starship. The ship map starts hidden, rooms fail under pressure, and every discovery pushes you closer to the Bridge and the truth.

How to Play

  • Start in the Docking Bay.
  • Explore by moving Up, Down, Left, and Right.
  • Rooms reveal as you enter them, and each room may have a Situation.
  • You have shared actions each round. Standard difficulty gives 4 actions.
  • End of round drains Suit Power and triggers ship escalation.
  • Find the Bridge to reveal what happened.
  • Complete the objective, then escape before Suit Power reaches 0.

What You're Trying to Do

First, find the Bridge. Then complete the revealed objective. Finally, return to a usable escape route and leave the ship with whatever survivors, knowledge, and evidence you recovered.

Accessibility Features

The prototype uses semantic controls, keyboard navigation, a text-based ship board, ARIA live narration, replayable messages, visible room states, and text summaries for status, inventory, and choices.

Play Room

Set Up Your Mission

Choose the team, difficulty, ship size, and accessibility settings before the rescue begins.

Settings

Settings are saved in this browser. Starting a new mission uses the options selected here.

Number of players

Choose whether one person controls the rescue team or two players share decisions.

Difficulty

Difficulty changes shared actions and time pressure. Easy is forgiving, Standard uses the core rules, and Hard is tighter.

Ship size

Ship size controls how many rooms are placed in the hidden connected layout.

Accessibility options

These options adjust presentation and narration without hiding information from screen readers.

Optional rules
Player 1 setup

Choose Player 1's rescue specialist. Role abilities appear as contextual choices when they can help.

Player 2 setup

Player 2 is active only in 2-player mode.