What are some good science fiction games?

[Boo8er]

I would like to know what are some good science fiction games that I should give a try that most of you have played? Do you have any to recommend?

[Jay R]

I'm assuming you mean role-playing games, or I would recommend Stellar Conquest or Merchants of Venus.

But for role-playing, I have one simple question: are your players willing to do simple arithmetic while setting up their characters?

If so, I strongly recommend Star Heroes.

If not, I very strongly don't recommend Star Heroes.

[golentan]

I recommend Traveller as one of my all time favorites, though it comes with the caveat that character creation by default is semi-random, and a lot of the game play revolves around the acquisition of wealth. But it's very much an adventure friendly universe, and the maximum speed of Jump 6 (no more than 6 parsecs travelled in a week) imposes a very old school age of sail feel.

[jaydubs]

I've enjoyed both Dark Heresy and Rogue Trader from the Warhammer 40k setting.

[Pluto!]

Diaspora is my favorite to play. It's a Fate game that goes for Hard Scifi. It has an SRD you could check out.

Blue Planet is my favorite scifi book. It also aims to be on the harder end of things, but stages the exploration and colonization of a waterworld. TBH, I've never used the system, but the fluff of the book has been gold in 3:16 Carnage Among the Stars and Cascade Failure games.

[Arbane]

Is Space Opera counts, Cosmic Patrol looks like a pretty good rules-light-ish game.

Real life has rendered the Cyberpunk games redundant, so that's out. fnord

GURPS has sourcebooks for pretty much everything, and a fair number of science-fiction-y ones, like Atomic Horror (1950s Big Bugs, alien invasions, and Communist Robots!), and Transhuman Space.

I've heard a lot of good things about Eclipse Phase (transhumanism with a dash of horror), and the rules are free.

Call of Cthulhu is technically science fiction....

[comicshorse]

For space opera I always liked 'Fading Suns'

[Yora]

I think Star Wars Saga Edition is a quite good game, for generic science fiction as well. I'm not a huge fan of d20 games, but as they go Saga is probably by far the best one. It's very easy to learn if you already played other d20 games.

[Brookshw]

What flavor of sci fi are we talking about? Offhand:
Future d20
Shadowrun
Cyberpunk
Gurps
Star wars
Traveller
Dark Heresy
Paranoia
TriStat
MechWarrior
No shortage of others

[TheEmerged]

It's a bit older, but the second-longest running campaign our group ever ran was a science-fiction campaign in the Alternity system. Looking back now you can see where TSR was experimenting with things that eventually found their way into D&D 3.x. It's a skill-based system where the five classes determine what those skills cost for you. The dice mechanic was an interesting one - you roll a d20 and then either add or subtract the result of another die depending on the bonus\penalty (and subtracting was good). Also intriguing was that there were degrees of success: if you made the target number (say 12) it was a success - but if you got half of that (6) it was a *good* success, and if you got half of that (3) it was an even bigger success.

[Dawgmoah]

Depends on what setting you're aiming for? Apocalyptic? Space Travel? Cyber? Planet of the Apes sort of deal? There are so many pre-formed settings (Dark Heresy, Star Wars, Shadowrun, Alternity, Serenity, Primate Terra, etc) and then more open-ended rule sets like D20 Future that give you the mechanics and you build whatever setting you want on top of it.

[Moofaa]

Nobody has mentioned Eclipse Phase yet?

It's great if you like transhuman science-fiction conspiracy and horror.