Apollo 47, Condensed

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This is the 120 page long version of my 1200 page Apollo 47 farce of a hardback book. Fear not, the condensed version loses nothing but a thousandish pages of NASA manuals you didn't need anyways.

Here, have a PDF of the first 20ish pages. It's all you need to play, the rest are prompt type things and really aren't necessary.

What you're getting:

*An 8.5 x 11 softcover book with 120 pages that contains 1 page of game, about 22 pages of prompts and advice on how to play the game, and a little less than a hundred pages of doubled up NASA imagery which will help prompt you along in play if you need it. The is 'soft touch' treated and has some foil on it.

*A PDF of the 1200 page version of the game.

*A PDF of the condensed version of the game.

"You know those scenes in movies where people are talking very urgently into a headset? Maybe it’s a heist film and someone’s crawling through an air duct, or it’s a science fiction film and a lonely astronaut is hurtling toward their doom. Whatever the context, that’s the vibe that game designer Tim Hutchings is trying to recreate with his latest project, Apollo 47 Technical Handbook, a one-page tabletop role-playing game with 1,199 additional pages of largely superfluous flavor text. It’s ... a bold choice, to say the least."

-Charlie Hall, Polygon

"Apollo 47 asks you to sit with boredom and stupidity in a way that boring, stupid games cannot come close to. When you play Apollo 47 there is a constant tension around wanting things to happen - interesting things, dramatic things - and every time they don't the game just gets better. Apollo 47 is easily one of my favorite games, ever."

-Jason Morningstar

"Apollo 47 does not play like the majority of other space RPGs, which tend to default to serious and high-stakes conflicts in a sci-fi setting. The Technical Handbook’s single paragraph of lore sums up the game’s tone and situation well: in an alternate-history 1986, moon missions are so regular and routine that they’ve become downright mundane for everyone involved."

-Līber Lūdōrum

"Apollo 47 makes the mundane enveloping. You start playing, and soon you'll have a crowd listening in to the latest issues with the RCU cable. It's a chill vibe of tech-speak improv that just makes my brain buzz pleasantly."

-James Stuart

In a somewhat alternate Earth in a rather different 1987 you will explore the Moon on the 47th Apollo Mission! The Moon! Where forty-six other moon missions have gone before. Forty-six. That's an awful lot of successful Moon missions.

And that's the point: Apollo 47 imagines a future where walking the surface of the Moon is a little bit boring. You engage in workaday astronaut activities using a simple improvisatory rules set to play in a quiet world of technobabble and the slow progression of science. If something exciting happens please stop play immediately and go do something else–you are in the wrong game.

This zero-prep game of improvisatory radio chatter can be played through just about any communications medium for any length of time. Five minutes to spare? Spend it recalibrating a JLDO unit that's gone out of alignment. Tighten the tamping line using the three baseline screws. The blue screen torques the focus to the left, the green screw adjusts the dust pan height. You should have a yellow-handled size 20 tamping gun and a slot puller in your work bag. Got them? Okay, so next...

One astronaut is supported by a team of voices on the radio. Work, banter, and cause gentle problems for each other.

I... I just can't explain this game any better than that.

Publication History:

The 1200 page version was released in 2022. It's still available over here. You can get cards there, too, but they aren't necessary.

The condensed version, which is what this page is selling you, was released at the end of 2025. It was printed through 48 Hour Books in an edition of 525. The next printing will have some tweaks on some the layered prompt pages that had a slight layering problem.