Blackgang

You never fly the ship or fire a shot — you keep her alive from the engine room while the battle rages somewhere overhead.

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.

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. Browse all games →