Had a similar experience recently, although it wasn’t with a total internet stranger.
A college friend of mine who is on a group chat mentioned one of his regrets was getting rid of his copy of a quirky old TSR RPG called “Star Frontiers”.
Turns out I had a copy, so I sent it to him as a surprise!
I loved playing TSR's Star Frontiers!
I think I bought an extra base game when I saw one a few years back...
We only ever got it to the table once as a one-shot.
It was fun until we did a chase sequence on that map that came in the boxed set.
Either the rules for chases were broken or we were way too young to understand them, because the PCs could neither gain ground on the people they were chasing nor did they ever fall further behind. So the game kinda lost momentum for us there.
But it had lots of fun, quirky game world stuff. I'd give it a go again.
Two best friends and I played Star Frontiers in our teen years, after years of D&D. Our characters finally saved enough to design and buy a spaceship of their own, and that's about as far as we got. (I redrew my friend's original design using early PC-based 3D CAD, which won an award at the county fair!)
Vee
Lone Spelunker
John Carlsen 🇺🇸🇳🇱🇪🇺