You never fly the ship or fire a shot, you keep her alive from the engine room while the battle rages somewhere overhead.
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How to play
A real-time engineering survival sim. The hull takes hits, fires break out, breaches vent your air and the reactor cooks under load, your job is to triage a finite crew and a finite power budget until the extraction timer runs out.
Dispatch crew: select a crew member, then click the room that needs them, they walk over to fight a fire, patch a breach or repair a system. Specialists do their own job about twice as fast.
Reroute power: the reactor outputs limited bars. Shields cut hull damage, life support makes oxygen, coolant bleeds off heat, you can't run everything at once.
Mind the couplings: fire devours oxygen and wrecks its system, a breach vents air but smothers flames, and running hot starves the reactor of output.
Obey or gamble on the captain's power demands to weapons and engines, and survive until extraction to win the shift.
Controls
Desktop: click a crew dot or roster row, then click a room to send them. Use the + / − pips to allocate reactor power. Space starts the shift, P pauses, V / B / C trigger the vent, battery-surge and coolant-purge overrides, Esc cancels.
Phone & tablet: you can tap a crew member then tap a room, and tap the power and override buttons, but the keyboard shortcuts and hover make a mouse and keyboard the recommended way to play.
Tips & strategy
Stage standby power before you press start, pre-shift setup decides whether the first crisis sinks you.
A controlled vent can smother a fire instantly, but it dumps oxygen, so only pull it when air is plentiful.
Keep coolant flowing whenever heat climbs; a throttled reactor means you can't power shields when the next salvo lands.
Send specialists to their specialty and use generalists to plug gaps elsewhere.
Origins
The title is a real term. The black gang were a ship's fire-room and engine-room crew — stokers and firemen — named for the soot and coal dust thick in the air down there, in the days of coal-fired steamships.
The original perspective follows from that: this is damage control from below decks, triaging a finite crew and a finite power budget while fires, breaches and reactor load compete for both.
Choosing the engineer's viewpoint is the design. You never see what is shooting at you, so there is no tactical decision to make about the enemy — only about which failure you can afford to let burn for another minute.
About Blackgang
Blackgang is an original, free browser game that reimagines the spaceship damage-control and resource-triage genre from the perspective of the engineer who never sees the enemy. Built in-house for PlayPendium.
A free, original browser game on PlayPendium. No download, no install.
