Alien Frontiers

[The Schaef]

I'm not sure how this game stayed off the boards for so long, but since they just had a hugely successful Kickstarter campaign for their expansion, and as one of their donors by reward copy of the base game just arrived, I think it's overdue for a mention.

Each player has a number of “ships” represented by standard six-sided dice in various colors. A turn consists of collecting your available dice, rolling them, and then assigning the results to different stations on the board. By placing dice of certain values – or in pairs or threes or straights – that station gives one of a variety of effects: providing or trading resources, building ships and colonies, taking technology cards, or raiding your opponent’s stash. That makes this more of a worker placement function (a la Caylus) than rolling for production. The game proceeds until one player has placed a certain number of colonies, and the highest score wins.

The components for this game are great, especially for lovers of science fiction. Not only is the game board laid out with artwork depicting space stations orbiting a colonized planet, but the regions of the planet are named after legendary science-fiction authors like Bradbury, Asimov and Heinlein. There are distinctly-shaped wooden bits for the resources and colonies, and even the cardboard bits are solid.

The elegance of this game lies in the fact that the gameplay itself is simple – it can be learned in one to two game rounds at most – but the number of options available, combined with the tension of having to cope with the results of your roll and sharing space with the other players, gives this game a considerable amount of strategic depth. One area where it shines over Catan, is that the technology cards are numerous and have a much wider variety of powers. In particular, the ability to manipulate or re-roll your dice is a big plus in my book, when dealing with dice-based games.

I've played this several times at my boardgaming club and enjoyed it every time.  Simple, engaging, and easily plays in under two hours.  And I really can't wait for the expansion; there are some VERY cool components coming in the near future.

[TimMierz]

I've gotten to play AF a couple times, and while I like it, the scoring is excessively chaotic and frustrates strategy some. Points keep changing hands so often, with so many powers being able to change things, that what seems like a moderately strategic game ends up veering into Fluxx/Malta territory, in my experience. I really want to like it, and I've greatly enjoyed the first two-thirds of each of my games, but it ends up unsatisfying to me.

[The Schaef]

That's odd, I never experienced that large fluctuation in score.  Ours has always been more modest than that, with the score changes being more similar to Catan, when people steal bonuses away from each other.  I think comparing it to Fluxx, where literally nothing is static or predictable even from one turn to the next, might be a bit much.

[TimMierz]

Okay, I exaggerated a little, but there still are sizable fluctuations in my limited experience. Perhaps as I played more and learned how to play better that would be less of an issue. But at the moment it moves my opinion from "OH MANS GOTTA HAS" to "It'd be nice to play once in a while."

(Current "OH MANS GOTTA HAS": Ascending Empires, Galaxy Trucker 2nd expansion, Montage)

[The Schaef]

Ascending Empires is nice.

You might like the AF expansion due out next spring.  They're adding hidden agendas and variable player powers, which should give people more ways to score and therefore dilute some of the fluctuation that comes from scoring only on area control plus the occasional tech card.

[TimMierz]

Hidden agendas and variable player powers are two of my favorite things in games in general, so that's a nice thing to know! Do I have to do Kickstarter preordering type stuff for that?

[The Schaef]

You don't HAVE to (especially since their drive is over) but I'll get mine two weeks ahead of yours if you (pre) order through regular channels.

In short, everything they gave out in stretch rewards, to my knowledge, will be available for retail purchase, with the agendas and player powers being the key components in the expansion.  There is also a Faction Pack which will include another new "faction" (origin of the VPP), and an Upgrade pack for people who want to pimp their base game by replacing the field tokens with sculpts, and the colony "skittles" with clear-domed colony sculpts.

Needless to say I am as excited, if not more, for the extra bits as the new rules.

If next year's nationals is a GO for me, and if you haven't gotten/tried the expanded game already, I'll make it a point to sit down to a game with you, and you can judge its play with the new stuff versus your initial experience.

[TimMierz]

I'd love to take you up on that! There are a ton of factors involved (where, when, who, wherefore, etc.), but I would be very happy to join you in a game of Alien Frontiers, or anything really (even Bang, as much as I've derided it). Good times.

[The Schaef]

lol Bang.

You know me, though, I'll probably pack more games than clothes, especially with all the "reserved" games I have for whatever nats I attend: Queen's Gambit with RR, Epic Duels with Prof Underwood and all comers, Cutthroat Caverns with TKP, 1960 and/or Twilight Struggle with MJB, Alien Frontiers with yourself, and I'm sure there will be had many games of Bang, Dominion and Battlestar Galactica.

It's almost like I've retired from Redemption to subvert nationals as a weekend board game festival 

... blame Bryon and Kevin for bringing Bang and Robo Rally, respectively.

[Prof Underwood]

Epic Duels with Prof Underwood

I'm totally up for this, and I'm also wanting to get in on a game of Shadows Over Camelot at Nats.  I'll probably be bringing both

I'd also be interested in learning Battlestar Galactica if someone was willing to teach that game there.

[SomeKittens]

I'd also be interested in learning Battlestar Galactica if someone was willing to teach that game there.

Basically, gameplay runs like this:
Try to make a jump?  You lose
Try to kill some Cylons?  You lose
Try to save some civilians?  You lose
Try to get elected president?  You lose


All of the above is negated if you're a Cylon, in which case, sit back and relax, you win!

[The Schaef]

I'm a little puzzled by that sentiment, since our club just had a huge BSG weekend event during Buckeye Game Fest, and 12 of the 13 games played were split 6/6 between humans and toasters.  The final game of the weekend was decided by a Doral (we were playing with a number of custom characters to accommodate the large turnout - I got to play Romo Lampkin all weekend!) who had the 2-or-fewer-Galactica-damage agenda, but was getting no help from either the humans or the Cylons in achieving this, so in a fit of spite, he used his once per game to kill Galactica on damage and win the game for the (other) Cylons.

Long story short, our games are pretty evenly split, with humans having an advantage in the Kobol objective, and Cylons dominating the New Caprica objective.

To Mark - if you've played Shadows, you already have the basic idea for Battlestar.  Everyone selects characters with specific attributes and special powers, including a once-per-game superpower, and then draws loyalty cards to establish humans and cylons.  During your turn, you move, then take an action, then draw a crisis card and resolve it (similar to the black deck in Shadows, or Mythos Phase in Arkham Horror).  Humans try to survive long enough to advance the jump track and jump the ship several times until they reach their final objective (Kobol in the base, but expansions give alternatives).  Cylons try to reduce resource dials to zero, damage Galactica, or get boarding parties through the ship.

Some of the key differences:
- Cylons have their own locations, giving them actual things to do on their turn as opposed to the effective auto-turn a revealed traitor gets in Shadows
- Instead of playing card for set collection, the cards in BSG either have an effect you can play on your turn (or sometimes out of turn to help another player), or a number value you can contribute to "skill checks", a frequent event when people secretly toss in cards to try and get to a certain number value, with some card colors being a positive value and others being negative.
- Loyalty is distributed in two phases, so halfway through the game, you could get a new loyalty card, and discover you have been a sleeper agent for the Cylons and not even known.

That right there is probably 80% of what you need to know to play the game, the rest is knowing what the cards do, knowing what the characters do, and knowing what the locations do, as well as some in-game experience.  If anyone wants to talk more about BSG, I very much welcome it, but for the sake of keeping this thread about Alien Frontiers, I suggest those discussions be taken here