From the introduction:
Style: Each First Contact Team scenario is an epic science mystery. The players take on the roles of some of the world’s greatest minds, trying to understand and communicate with an intelligent alien species. There may be danger, possibly even combat, but the primary element of gameplay is unraveling the mystery of the alien life form. First Contact Team eschews the sci-fi tropes of human-looking, human-acting aliens and universal translators and instead seeks to create species that challenge player with their sheer difference from humanity.
Characters: A new team is assembled for each first contact scenario. After being given a brief on the current scenario, players take the role of a committee tasked with assembling the team that will make contact. The committee must decide what skills, specialties and backgrounds they want on the team. Also, what disabilities or other flaws are the committee willing to live with in order to get the best possible people? After the general details are agreed upon, each player creates a character. Player Characters (PCs) are the world’s top scientists, diplomats, mathematicians, soldiers and astronauts. Character creation involves choosing attributes, skills and equipment, each from a pool of points. Advantages and disads can be taken to round out each character.
Adventures: Each First Contact Team scenario assumes that this is humanity’s first contact with alien life. The players have every resource that the governments of the world can give them. Contact can take place in a wide variety of locations, familiar or unfamiliar, safe or dangerous, on earth or beyond. The aliens may be friendly, may be hostile, or may not to fall easily into these anthropocentric categories. Players win if they come to understand enough about the alien beings to communicate with them and/or understand their intentions.
Tech Level: First Contact Team is assumed to take place now or in the near future. Therefor, science and technology is mostly the same as it is today. We can assume that if some technology needs to be developed to make first contact possible (e.g. to put the First Contact Team on the surface of Mars to investigate signs of alien life there) that world governments have rushed the development of this technology, but that not much else has changed.
Game Mechanics: First Contact Team uses Organic Rule Components Lite, a ruleset designed for lite or live action simulationist play. The basic mechanic is to compare one’s AV (attribute + skill + equipment) to either the difficulty for a task or to an opponent’s AV. You then do something that gives you a 50% chance of winning (e.g. a coin flip) until you lose a number of times equal to your AV or win a number of times equal to the difficulty or to opponent’s AV.