Games Like Almost Retired

You are a miner, and you are almost done.

Forty years in the belt. One cell of charge per shift, a tractor beam, and three tools that each know one job. Cut a meteor open, take what's inside, sell it to people who need it. Put what's left into the fund. When the fund is full, you retire. To a planet you have only seen in a brochure, where someone is waiting who was a child last time you visited. That's the whole game. Nothing chases you. Nothing runs out. The belt will still be here tomorrow.

The right tool for the layer

Every meteor is built in layers: a dull crust, something better underneath, and sometimes a core worth the whole shift.

Any tool cuts anything. The right one just does it better.

A shift at a time

Scan the field. Pick your rock. Work it down layer by layer while the sun drops behind the belt. Dock. Sell to the orders on the board. Spend on the pod or the station. Decide how much goes into the fund this time. Then do it again, for as long as you like.

The people on the board

Orders come from people. A foreman whose crew broke the thing that makes the other things. A widow keeping her husband's ship running. A robot with no reasons, only wants. Between belts you'll meet stranger things: a buoy selling equipment that does not work in zero gravity, a broadcast about who really owns the rocks, a memorial nobody maintains, a man in a too-tight shirt explaining why saving for retirement is a waste of your time.

The fund

Deposits are one-way. The bar fills slowly, then all at once, and one day the station tells you that you are done. Or you leave early. That's allowed too. The game never punishes you for it, but it will remember.

What's in it