Starfield's greatest mystery is a boardgame nobody knows how to play

rockpapershotgun.com:

One thing that keeps luring me back to Starfield - other than the idea of building space stations out of onions - is a mysterious game within the game. Titled "Symbol Game", it consists of chunky, etched, sloping pieces and a 4x6 grid mat adorned with stars, dots and lines. You may have pocketed a few sets, during your journeys across the Settled Systems. They're not hard to find. But as far as I can tell, nobody has discovered the rules, though there are plenty of theories.

I only have one of the mats myself, but they apparently come in different materials - wood, plastic and bone. The pieces are named in the game's database - Assaulter, Defender, Shadowqueen and Snowlord. The Assaulter and Defender pieces are relatively easy to decipher. Shadowqueen is harder to pin down - it appears to be a reference to The Elder Scrolls Online. Snowlord? Your guess is as good as mine.

Naturally, when I seek the answer to some opaque nugget of RPG bricabrac, the first thing I do is visit the subreddits. There are a bunch of threads about Symbol Game from the past month, with redditors straining to deduce the rules from the design of the board, and the way boards are set up in Starfield's many colony habitats and ship canteens. Interpretations are as abundant as posts. For some, the symbols are starting locations for the pieces; for others, they're locations to be captured. Do the symbols dictate how pieces move? Is the goal just to take all the other player's pieces, or maneouvre one piece to the diamonds at each end of the board?

There are other table-top games in Starfield, like Solar Frontier and Starlocked, but these appear only as boxes - you can't pick up the components and fiddle around with them, admiring their curious