The video is great but there are some minor issues regarding the game. First, it is true that once you assemble the spaceships in the stand and in the base, there is no use for the plastic insert where they came except if you disassemble them after the game. We did so, it does not take so much time, the game stays always as new inside the box and does not seem to be a problem to assemble and disassemble the pieces every time. Maybe in the long term it could be some damage in the join point due to material wearing but I do not know for sure.
Also, the game comes with two board which are basically the same thing, a hexagonal grid over a background of the space. On the video it is suggested that they should have put the two board in one, using both sides of the board. Actually the idea is to allow to play with one or with two board. The game is scenario driven and some scenarios require two boards (and four players).
In the video, also, we can see how a transport ship is deployed, moved and then the ships inside are launched into the board. Actually this is not possible, deployment is the phase previous to movement and also includes launching ships from a transporter, so if you deploy your transporter and move, you are already in a different phase and you can not deploy further ships (including the ones inside the transporter).
The miniatures are prepainted, with a good quality finish on them and they feel right on the hands. They are to be mounted on a stand which goes into a base.
There are two little screens, one for each faction, to hide your fleet from the opponent.
Also each faction has its own deck of cards, called Tactics cards, which include heroes, ship upgrades, additional weapons and maneuvers for the fleet.
For each miniature we have two cards with the statistics, actually there are three set of stats for each ship, one for the standard version, one for the seasoned version and one for the veteran version.
Each version has a different launch cost but also different, better skills as the crew becomes more experienced in combat.
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| Some of the ISN components used in the game from last Friday |
As I already say the game is scenario driven. The rules book comes with several scenarios, and for a starting game they advise to use the scenario called Dead Zone.
In this scenario the initial fleets and the composition of the Tactic Cards decks are given for each player, only one board is used with three discovery tiles on it and the victory condition is to eliminate all the ships of the opponent from the board after the second round. The reason for this victory condition I will comment later.
First I would like to comment on the discovery tiles. The game comes with several tiles, some are called discovery tiles other are obstacle tiles and there is even a "One victory point" token. Those tiles are suppose to be used on the scenario as required by it.
In this basic scenario, the discovery token are shuffled, three are taken and placed face down on three pre-determined spots on the board. If a ship happens to end its movement on the tile, it is move face up and the effect of the tile takes place immediately. The Rules Book explain what each tile does.
How the game works? Well, let go with the battle report from the game last Friday.
The game was between two new players and even if I was supposed to explain them the game I must said that I only read the rules and that I never played it before. But the rules are so straight forward that I think that we didn't make too many mistakes :)
Both player get 15 points of energy, 5 tactics cards and their fleet (which goes behind the screen).
They also roll a dice to see who rolls the higher number, the player with the high roll decides who starts. In our game the ISN player won this roll but she decided to let the Wretcheridians start the game.
The starting player gets 5 more energy and 1 tactic card, so before he decided what to do he was having 20 energy and 6 cards. That is always the first phase, collect energy and one card. There is limit of 10 cards in the hand. If at the moment of drawing this one new cards, doing so will make that the limit of 10 is exceed, the player has to discard enough cards so that he can take the new one before drawing this new one. Each discarded card gives the player one energy extra.
If you are getting the idea that energy and no the cards are the critical part of the game, you are right :)
The second phase is deployment or launching ships. Every ship has a launch cost that you pay with energy to deploy it on your border of the battleboard or to launch it from a transporter.
The Wretcheridians decided to put all their fleet inside of the transporter and deploy it on their border of the board.
A transporter ship has a cargo capacity which can not be exceeded and can only transport ships that are smaller than itself. So a Large ship can transport Medium and Small ships, a Medium ship can only transport Small ships and Small ships cannot transport other ships.
The initial fleet of each player for this scenario were a Large transport ship, two Medium ships and one squadron of three Small ships, so all of them fitted inside the Large transport ship :)
The Wretcheridians end the deployment phase.
The final phase is activation, here the player can pay the energy to activate one ship which would be entitled to move and the after paying the charging cost of the weapons to fire with them.
The Wretcheridians activated the transporter ship and moved it towards the center of the board.
Now, the ISN turn started.
The ISN player got 10 energy points and one card. Only on the first round of the first player will the first player get 5 energy on the energy phase, after that each player gets 10 energy in the energy phase.
She also placed all her ships inside of the transport ship and deployed her on one corner of the board.
After paying the activation cost, she moved her along the left flank.
The victory condition activates only after the second round to avoid that a lucky hit from the opponent which destroy the only deployed ship on the board (or the few deployed ships) when you still have more ships behind the screen to be deployed (not the case here as both players put all their ships inside the transporter ships) in the 1st or 2nd round will end the game prematurely. So, you have 2 round to deploy your ships, after that if all the ship on the board get destroy, you loss, even if you still have more ships behind your screen awaiting to be deployed.
Anyway, now it is the second round of the Wretcheridians, they got 10 energy and one card. Instead of launching (deploying) any ships from inside the transporter, he decided to pay the activation energy and to move the ship closer to the centre of the board and onto the discovery tile there, which turned out to be an alien artifact which gave him 7 extra spaces range to the primary weapon of the ship placed over the tile, which was his transport ship. Actually this gave him almost infinite range as the primary weapon was having already a range of 4 hexagons.
With the extra range and a shield siphon card played on the transport ship, he decided to attack the ISN transport ship with pretty good result. The shield siphon gave him one extra shield for his ship from the attack.
How you count damage and shields in the game ? quite easy. The bases of the ships have holes to place counters. Blue counters represent shields, red counters represent damage. Each ship starts with a certain amount of blue shield counters and each damage removes one or more, depending on the strength of the weapon. Once you have no shields, the ship starts taking hull damage, if a certain value is taken, the ship is destroyed. Some weapons or cards can by-pass the shields and damage directly the hull.
How you hit enemy ships in the game?
You roll two dices for each attack. One dice is a d10 with letters instead of numbers the other one is a d8 with numbers and each ship has a matrix on her reference card with the blue print of the ship. If the coordinates of the attack are outside the blue print of the ship, there is no hit; if the coordinates indicate the red dot inside the ship, she will explode if the ship get damaged there (no shield or effect which ignores them); otherwise the ship will take damage as stated before.
Sounds confusing ? my fault. The game is actually simple and with very straightforward rules.
Next round: Due to the damage to her transport ship, the ISN player deployed the squadron of fighters and a medium vessel, attacking also the Wretcheridians transport ship with everything. This also included two nukes which however did nothing as they fail to impact the enemy.
The Wretcheridians kept on attacking the ISN transport ship, which moved away in the next round, approaching a discovery tile on the border of the battlefield and deploying the last medium ship she was carrying. Also one of the ISN figthers was destroyed.
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| The ISN transport ship took serius damage this round |
Just right on time as the Wretcheridians destroyed the ISN transport ship in the next round.
However in a feat of amazing fire power, the remaining two medium ships managed to reduce the Wretcheridians transport ship into small, incandescent pieces, together with the medium ship and the squadron of fighters still inside of her.
Now, it was a dogfight between the remaining Wretcheridians medium ship and the ISN ships which approached a insane final when each site was having only one medium ship at 2 range from each other in a mortal barrage of fire.
This time, the Goddess of War was smiling on the Wretcheridians who remained as only survivors on the space.
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