Buck Rogers: Countdown to Doomsday

The Gold Box in the 25th century

Buck Rogers: Countdown to Doomsday is a 1990 role-playing game from Strategic Simulations, Inc., built on the very same Gold Box engine that powered SSI’s Advanced Dungeons & Dragons titles such as Pool of Radiance and Champions of Krynn. It trades the Forgotten Realms for the Buck Rogers XXVC universe — TSR’s science-fiction tabletop setting of the 25th century — but the machinery underneath is pure Gold Box: a party of six, first-person exploration, and the tactical, top-down, initiative-based combat that defined the series.

Because it runs on the AD&D-derived Gold Box ruleset rather than its own bespoke system, it sits among the unofficial entries — a sibling of the D&D Gold Box games in everything but the licensed setting.

Gameplay

You build a party of New Earth Organization (NEO) recruits, choosing from classes like Rocketjock, Warrior, Rogue, Medic, and Engineer, and from the genetically engineered human lineages of the setting (Tinkers, Desert Runners, and others). Skills, combat, and advancement follow the familiar Gold Box pattern, with ranged firefights and zero-gravity encounters standing in for the dungeon brawls of the fantasy titles. Characters can be exported and carried forward into the sequel, Matrix Cubed.

Plot

The party fights for NEO against the Russo-American Mercantile (RAM), the corporate power that rules a terraformed Mars and threatens Earth. What begins as a recruit’s first mission escalates into a campaign to thwart RAM’s doomsday plot, ranging across orbital stations, asteroid settlements, and the Martian surface.