So .. the usual 8 x 8 board. Mostly full, say 56 pieces, two colours. One player is yellow, the other player is blue. Two "runners" for each player. Runners can move orthogonally to an empty space. Runners move as far as they want down a row or column, jumping over pieces, as long as they land on an empty space. Ordinary pieces ("pieces", I'll wind up calling them pawns) can only move to an adjacent empty space, and a player can only move his colour. Players spend their turns choking off the movement options for the opponent while opening up routes for their own runners. The last player who can move a runner wins.
 

Here is the state of things, mid experimentation. 5 x 5 board. Rooks are called rooks because they are physical rooks, although they don't behave the same way. I'll refer to glass pieces as pawns. Everything starts in a random position on the board. Two yellow rooks, two blue rooks, two empty spaces, nine blue pawns, nine yellow pawns. That leaves one extra pawn that can be used by either player, a different colour (an in-between colour?). Start with 25 glass pieces with different colours, mix them up then put them on the board. Then replace colour C with blue rooks and colour D with yellow rooks. Remove the two colour E because those are empty positions. There can be bad start positions. Maybe some I split you choose.
 

Ten blue pawns, ten yellow, one green neutral. Two glass pieces colour C, two colour E. No spaces. Randomise, put on the 5 x 5 board. Replace colour C and E with the rooks. Blue player removes one blue pawn, yellow removes a yellow, so you have your two spaces. For a turn you move your rook and your pawn, in either order, and moving the pawn is optional. If you can't move your rook, you lose.

So how do I find it? Cute. Light, not a brain burner, put down the board and easily play with someone, short. Good for that long-distance space voyage. In fact, it could be called Space. I was and remain cautiously pessimistic. It may turn out to be too brief (or, with tweaked rules, too long). It may turn out to be dreary, with the game playing itself, limited options. There may be spaces surrounded by a friendly colour, leading to a sort of stalemate, an unassailable fortress. Still play testing.

Not the smoothest setup. In the real world there could be all discs, where the runners/rooks are discs with a design on them. Or is it still better to have more vertical rooks? Photograph coming.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Star Trek has a bridge, with a handful of people who have specific areas of responsibility. They're travelling through space looking for weird worlds, new life and civilisations. There's a captain, a communications lady, a science officer, and whatever Sulu and Chekov do. The doctor and the engineer have roles, but they are not on the bridge.

Who would be on the bridge for Alouette? Alouette is a long-distance space bus, with some colourful attached pods and some science. Alouette goes fast through a solar system. Also it goes at ludicrous speed through (part of) the galaxy. Pods, shuttle craft, space stations, refuelling are all tricky. Alouette does not land on planets.

So the Alouette bridge would have, I don't know, an executive officer/officer of the deck, a helmsman to steer things, a navigator, maybe someone to keep an eye on the status of the ship ("What's that alarm?"). When dealing with separate space craft there could be other officers, including a communications person. Other people would be based largely elsewhere on the ship. The captain, who is responsible for .. everything would be various places including the bridge. There is the medical section. Engineering. Integration officer, to deal with the pods. Science people. Supply. Guest services or some such.

Is the communications person responsible for external communications - and internal communications?
 
 

I imagine going on a long trip through deep space would mostly be stultifyingly boring on the bridge. Cruises and yachts sometimes have passengers visit the bridge. The space bridge crew at least pretend to have important things they are doing. Then they go back to doing close to nothing. The guy clicks back to the thing on his screen that he had clicked away from.