The Culture: The Best Space Adventure Game For Clubhouse Campaigning

One more game that is best done in a clubhouse environment, and without Muh Official Setting dragging things down.

You approach this game exactly the same way as Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st Edition.

You print off a blank hex map. You roll up one planet. You run adventures on that planet. Other players in the campaign can pick another hex and roll up their own planet to run adventures there.

That planet you rolled up, using the tables in the rulebook, can produce some wild results that are open to interpretation and will prompt questions whose answers cannot help but to generate playable adventure scenarios and factions on-world sufficient to have planetary (or intrasystem) Patron Play conflicts in themselves.

Then there's going to be intersystem Patron Play, which will build upon that intrasystem layer, leading to a fractal explosion of playable adventure scenarios.

And yes, there's going to be room for bigger actions.

You don't need the Third Imperium. You don't need anything but what you and your fellow players generate off the procedural content generator tools in the rules, and the setting you generate as you play will be more substantive, more real, and more visceral than anything Games Designers' Workshop (or any of the fansites or successors) ever published.

And yes, you can find this stuff used; don't buy new unless you're out of options. This is the space adventure counterpart to AD&D1e, and it should be honored accordingly.

(Honorable Mention goes to Renegade Legion; good luck getting all of the subgames, but you do have an ideal clubhouse campaign product line with that.)