Played with my brother tonight.
We ran the same mission as before. He was the Pilots, I ran the Engineers and Tacticians. We made it through 3 regions and successfully docked at the Karasou Medical Facility, but not without taking some damage fending off a Pirate (a Harpooner, the worst kind – known for killing the crew and destroying the ships of their prey, morale instantly drops at the sight of their fearsom vessels) We avoided some Ice Worms, successfully bypassed some Patrolers and traded a few times with Kelp Harvesters.
A few observations:
1) My prototype is still rough. We ran into a few cards that needed work, but this is the whoel point of prototyping.
2) The Turn Order: each day, the Engineers act, then Pilots and finally Tacticians. Each group draws a card and then reacts, except for the Tacticians who must allocate their guys before drawing a card. This seems weird, and it occured to me that all crews could allocate first and then draw a card. The only thing this might reduce is the choice of the Pilot, who decides ‘do I want this Comm Card enough to sacrifice movement to get it?’ Which leads me to my next point…
3) Since movement is so valuable, I realize that the Comm deck must contain nothing but highly valuable cards if the Pilot is to be choosing between focusing on picking up transmissions or moving the ship. This isn’t hard. I just need to make the rewards of the Comm deck much greater.
4) During Encounters, Tacticians fire weapons and are very valuable. During the Days however, they choose between scanning (redrawing Encounter cards if you don’t liek what you get) or gathering resources (which gets you money, but isn’t even an option if your cargo holds are full of something more valubale than whatever is available). But the answer to this might lie in the Comm Cards as well. If some Comm Cards have requirements, such as ‘Place 2 Crew in Diagnostics to accomplish X and receive tons of goodies’ then Tacticians may be more readily used to accomplish said tasks. That would pull them around the ship more and make ‘I leave all my guys in Scanning’ not an issue.
5) Prices of cargo could be simplified, perhaps to avoid odd numbers (which I find more difficult to calculate in my head). Although players might benefit greatly from just having a calculator handy, too. Although most people who play games of this nature are very good at math, so this might not be an issue at all. It just gets tricky when you have FISH cargo, which sells for 3 each, and you’ve gathered 13, and you have a card that tripples their worth…
6) I put flavor text on certain cards, but I honestly think the game might benefit from removing that. Players can use their imaginations better if they are given an idea rather than a sentence of description, I think. This is all fluff for now though, I should focus on mechanics.
7) New way of firing weapons worked out great.
That’s all for now. Alex (my brother) said he felt the game has lots of potential and he enjoyed himself.
