LogFAQs > #985843831

Other than the main solar system map, there's a planet map where all 7 of the planets other than earth (and some of their moons) are along with the bonuses you get for going to them (I will go over that more in a bit). There's also 2 random facedown alien boards (out of 5) that will get flipped at a certain point in the game. There's some scoring milestones revealed for the game, that change every game, a market of cards and a market of tech tiles.

The last main piece of setup is the player board. Each player has their own board that has some of the actions depicted on them that you can upgrade as the game goes on via tech tiles. If you have played Scythe it is very similar to that system except you are putting stuff on the board instead of taking it off to upgrade it. Each player also gets some starting resources, 5 starting cards, and then can turn one of their cards into income (will go over this in a bit).

Resource wise you have credits, energy, publicity (which is actually a track 0-10), and data (which is a special kind of resource, you don't start with this or get it normally). Cards can be considered a resource as well and you can at any point on your turn, change any 2 of energy/credit/cards (the two must be the same) into one of energy/credits/cards. Ie I can spend 2 energy to take a card. When you take a card you will either take one from the market of your choice or draw off the top of the deck, depending on what the symbol for the draw card is.

So now that you have an idea of the setup, lets go through how a round works. A round starts with the starting player taking one main action and as many free actions as they'd like (in any order), then the next player doing the same, the next etc. Once a player has no more main actions they want to do they pass, discard down to four cards if they have more, choose one card from the stack of end-of round cards (basically # of players + 1 random cards, so the earlier you pass the more options you have) and then if they are the first to pass do a solar system rotate. Once everyone passes the round ends, if that was the fifth round the game ends, otherwise everyone gets their income and the starting player rotates and the next round begins.

I mentioned rotating the solar system so I will go over that real quick. There's a small circle track with three spaces and you basically just move it along that track and do whatever the space is for. The first time you will rotate the inner ring, then the inner and middle ring, and finally the all three rings and then back again. Any pieces on that ring will move with it, but if its in the gap of the ring it may get pushed. This can sometimes be used for your advantage or it can hurt you if you aren't prepared.

So before I go any further I want to go over the anatomy of a card. Like is becoming more common, these cards are multi-use. On the top left of a card is a free action, you can discard a card as a free action for whatever this symbol is, it's usually a weaker effect but it might be what you need. On the top right is a color that corresponds to one or two sectors, this will be relevant later in the scan action. The bottom right of the card is it's income effect, if you turn this card into income this is what you will get each round moving forward (you have some base income already this is additional). I believe the income is usually either a random card, a credit or an energy. The last part of the card is the cost (of credits and can be) and the effect of the card. Sometimes the effect includes a mission that will give you an additional bonus once you complete it.

So lets now go over the main actions you can do on your turn. The first playing a card for it's cost (this is no the free action of the card). You can launch a probe from earth onto the solar system map. You can orbit a planet other than earth that your probe it at. You can land on a planet your probe is on, you can scan a sector (or multiple), you can analyze data and you can research a tech.

While everything is interconnected I'm going to roughly group these into three categories and go over them in that way. The first category is what I would consider the probe category. On your player board these are upgraded through the probe (orange) techs. By default you can have one probe active in the solar system board but can upgrade to have two. One of your primary actions is to launch a probe which will start on earth. You can use a free action to spend an energy to move it one space. By default moving through an asteroid takes two energy but you can upgrade it to where it costs 1 and actually gives you a publicity. There are a few other bonus spaces as well but you are typically trying to move it to a planet.

Once you have a probe at a planet you can use a main action to either orbit or land on the planet. When you do either you take your probe off the solar system and place it on the planets corresponding track. multiple people can orbit/land on the same planet and you get rewards for doing so but the first person to do each usually gets an additional bonus. Also note you are encouraged to orbit first because if anyone is orbiting a planet its cheaper for anyone to land there. Some planets also have moons that you can land on once you have the corresponding technology (or play a card that lets you bypass that requirement. Only one person can land on each moon, and while they give resources still, you mainly land on them because they give large amounts of victory points.

Landing/Orbiting on planets is good for various reasons, but its also one of the few ways to bump your income. If you gets this you tuck one of the cards in your hand in your income stack so just the bottom is showing and you will start earning that resource each round for the rest of the game.

The second set of actions I want to talk about is what I would call the signal/data actions. This is two main actions (Scan and analyze Data) that let you scan sectors to get data and other bonuses and then use that data to get more bonuses. I will say there is more ways to get data, such as landing on some planets/moons, but this is one of the primary ways and the only real way to make use of it. Both of these actions have their own track that are heavily upgradeable.

So by default the scan action will let you mark two signals . So each sector begins with a number of blue signals depending on the sector (I believe its from like 4 to 8) and when you mark a signal you take one of the blue signals as data and replace it with a signal of your color. The data then goes into your data bank that you can use immediately or wait on, but you can only store 6 max before you have to use it.

Once a sector is completely full of players markers, everyone that contributed gets a bonus, and whoever contributed the most gets a bigger bonus (ties goes to whoever does it most recently). This usually means you want to either be the highest contributor or just have one in. But back to the scan action, you can't just choose any of the 8 sectors to scan. By default you will scan the sector in the octant that earth is in, and for your second you will discard one of the cards in the market and scan a sector of the color of that card (this is where that color on the top right comes in). I believe every color corresponds to two sectors so you will have some choice, but I think black cards are rarer then the others (but also have less markers to fill.