(for anyone not following the conversation, we're talking about Rymdkapsel)
The basic gameplay works thusly: You get tetrominoes as shapes and can place them on your space station as rooms. Corridors are pathways, generators produce the energy resource, gardens and kitchens work together to produce the food resource, harvesters collect the purple resource, quarters increase your crew cap and weapons rooms can be manned to defend. The tetromino shape does not alter the way a room works, just where it fits. You have three goals in the game: Research all monoliths (one is placed in each corner of the map), do so in less than 45 minutes, survive 28 waves of alien attacks. Researching a monolith is done by building a corridor to it and then assigning up to three crewblocks to researching, when that's done you get some minor boost.
You get attacked regularly by aliens, as far as I can tell there's only two alien types (and one is just a tutorial dummy). Defending is done by assigning your crewblocks to weapons rooms but they will just staff whatever room is closest. Up to two crew can work in such a room (each manning one gun) and the guns can't be taken out of the room so you've effectively got towers. One kind of tower. If you have more weapons rooms than crew they'll get staffed pretty much randomly. Since there's no threat between waves it amounts to "drag all crew to weapons whenever enemies come, then resume work".
The pink resource requires claiming particle fields with extractors and is finite, strangely extractors cost a lot of pink and there's no safety feature to prevent you from spending all your pink before you would be unable to build more extractors. Similarly reactors cost a lot of energy but at least they're infinite.
Crewblocks aren't terribly smart, they'll happily cart five blocks of energy to a corridor construction (which costs only one), then once that corridor is done drop that energy (returns it to storage) before grabbing another block for the next corridor. Or one crewblock puts a food token on a quarter (two tokens spawn a new crewblock) and another one runs in and steals it to use it on a construction.
Overall there's just little to do. Get a basic economy, increase crew along with weapons capacity, build corridors to monoliths, wait for research to complete, run to weapons rooms when enemies come, ding you win the game. Wanna try again? You may get different tetrominoes and the monolith islands may have their entrances in slightly different places but it's still the same setup. There's not enough to stay interesting through a single match and as far as I can tell no incentive to play again.
It's a basic idea (room construction with tetrominoes, just assigning staff to roles instead of direct commands) that's not developed enough to carry a game.
