Star Borg by Kyle Latino & JP Coovert
Some time around breakfast I decided the first game I ran in 2026 had to be a Star War. Don't ask me why. I'm not the biggest fan and I've tended to do a hard bounce off the rules for most tabletop editions - and yet I wanted to run a Star War. I think there's just something about the setting that fundamentally appeals: an evil authority to rebel against, faceless goons you don't need to negotiate with, crime bosses who keep monsters for pets, etc.
I've always kept Hack Wars in my back pocket in case of this specific emergency but I'll be real with you: the more time goes on the lazier I become as a game master. I want short rule books, and I want to do as little work possible to get a game running for my friends. Without a random table to generate an adventure or some enemy examples, Hack Wars was not going to do the trick. One quick Youtube search later and I stumbled across a great video by JP Coovert about his game, Star Borg.
This felt like algorithmic synchronicity. Far too often videos about tabletop games are either "reviews" by someone who hasn't even run the game or multipart, multihour actual plays I'm absolutely not going to watch. So to find a creator showcasing their game and how it can be used to get a session running? *Chefs Kiss*
That video was all I needed to see to be convinced to purchase and run a session of Star Borg using its starter adventure The Legion's Foil.
It's a simple system: 1d20 + ability score to beat a Difficulty Rating (DR) for most skill and combat tests. 12 is Normal difficulty. I didn't use a single DR over 15 for the session and that felt fine, my players failed enough to keep things dangerous and interesting.
The quick and dirty of this adventure: The Not-Empire has been mucking about with planet scale teleportation. Our Rebel heroes must infiltrate their lab that been zapped across the galaxy into a binary star system.
My players came through with a fun group of Rebels: Aster! Jaded smuggler, searching for lost Rebel twin brother. Snarl! Grizzled not-Wookie who just wants to retire to a moisture farm. And KN! The amoral trash compactor bot that somehow ended up being the party face.
Things were pretty urgent for our group from the start. Aster learned from their info-broker, Boomer, that her twin brother Sammie had been sent on a recon mission to the Legion base on Nemus 4 they were attempting to infiltrate before he was declared MIA. But a recent signal from that same base - somehow 10 parsecs from where it should be - gave them hope he might still be alive.
Thanks to some very bad rolls, our hero's and their ship, The Aluminum Hawk, had a hard time making it through the debris field surrounding Nemus 4. It was full of corpses and buildings that had become dislodged from the planet. One ship disabling crash-landing later, they were infiltrating the Legion base.
Here is where Legion's Foil really shines as a starter adventure: there are some great NPCs and enemies to encounter in the ruined base. My players pistol-whipped and data jacked a maintenance bot, played rodeo with a big space rhino and ended up in a Mexican standoff with a crew of space pirates who'd arrived to loot the base before they did.
This all lead to a pretty fun negotiation between the party and the adventure's villain, Legion scientist Ado Thorsh. She needed the data they'd stolen on her quantum teleportation experiments. And the party wanted to secure the rescue of Aster's brother, Thorsh's prisoner and test subject.
In a pretty heroic compromise, KN stuffs himself with explosives and agrees to be traded for Aster's brother as the rest of the party waits in the hangar bay. Sammie, all Jeff-Goldblum-in-The Fly'd, after being used as a teleportation test subject begs for a mercy kill. KN delivers it without a second thought before detonating himself in Ado Thorsh's lab. Aster and Snarl escape the base believing Thorsh killed her brother.
Our mission ends with Snarl retiring to that moisture farm, Aster taking up her brother's mantle as a committed rebel, and the Rebel alliance getting a sterling recommendation to continue repurposing trash compactor bots for field missions. Also a post-credit tease of the sole surviving space pirate plotting revenge on Aster and Snarl.
Overall Thoughts: As someone who is not really a fan of Mork Borg, I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed running Star Borg. It's a breezy, readable package that gives you everything needed to generate some Star Wars style adventures. Light enough to use for a quick pick-up again, with enough options to run a campaign.
I really love that every Rebel archetype gets a thing they are working towards when they are done fighting - if they make it to the end of the war that is. RIP KN5B.
This game pretty much checks all of my boxes: the mechanics were easy for me to learn, it was easy to run, my players were able to make their characters quickly. And most importantly, we got a ton of laughs out of the session. Not only was this a great first time run, but I think I would gladly add it to the table rotation.
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