August update - general project status, final production changes, and a new proposed change
over 1 year ago – Thu, Sep 01, 2022 at 09:15:23 PM

Hey all!

Hope you're enjoying the last few weeks of your summer and gearing up for an epic fall! This month's update will focus on changes to the final production, including a key change we need your feedback on, but we'll start with a brief status update as well. Let's go!

Project Status

Here's our updated project status tracker:

What you'll notice here is that the game dev is essentially DONE! This includes the base game rules, ALL rules for the 18x anomalies and their components, and all related playtesting. Also, we now have 100% of the artwork for the game done. What remains is some final graphic design, rulebook example images, and some boxes/packaging for the various products. 

Ch-ch-ch-changes!

We wanted to give you the list of production changes that we are currently tracking. These are aspects that differ from what we knew or anticipated during the Kickstarter, due to game development, rules changes, and/or production related impacts. Note that some aspects are subject to further change, as we work through final details with our manufacturer:

•  Planet tiles in Deluxe Upgrade expansion: The Deluxe Upgrade expansion was going to include "triple layered planet tiles." Based on the final graphic design, these tiles do not need to be triple layered...  double layer will still allow for the desired recessed areas on both sides of the tiles. Optimized!
•  Luxury Nav Links quantity: Because of the way the Rocket Drive and Drop Drive systems now work in the game, the required quantity of plastic links is lower. The pack will now include 35 links (7 of each of the 5 player colors). To make up for the reduced cost, we have increased many other component counts through the various products  - read on....
•  Space Coins quantity: As we playtested with the quantity of coins we originally planned, we found we were running up against the natural component limit. Therefore, because we were able to reduce costs elsewhere (notably the Luxury Nav Links pack) we have added additional Space Coins to many of the products (base game, KS exclusive crossover pack, 5th captain pack, etc.). Much better!
•  Market demand tokens: Originally these were going to be wooden cubes, but we think a way cooler component to use is hexagonal wooden tokens...  and of course these will still "slot in" to the recessed areas of the deluxe planet tiles. Very cool!
•  Dark Jelly cubes quantity in KS exclusive crossover pack: We decided to include THREE of the Dark Jelly cubes in the KS exclusive crossover pack, rather than the two we previously anticipated. Drop Drive makes use of 2 of these cubes for the Dark Jelly anomaly, but then you are also getting a Huge Monster card so you could include a Dark Jelly cube in Dungeon Drop - now you will have a 3rd dedicated Dark Jelly cube to put in your Dungeon Drop box, rather than needing to share the other 2 with Drop Drive. Sweet (I mean the change is sweet...  not the jelly cubes themselves - DON'T try to eat the jelly cubes!)!!
•  Heat printed fuel tokens quantity in base game: For game balance reasons, we increased the number of heat printed fuel tokens from 6 to 7 in the base game. More is better!
•  Components included in 5th Captain pack: The 5th captain pack will now include a BUNCH more components than previously expected. It will still include extra plastic nav links, space coins, player die and ship token, and the extra captain tile, but it will now ALSO include the following: 5 extra asteroids (1 of each color), an extra heat-printed Salvage token, and 2 extra heat-printed Fuel tokens. Then, because of how pirate ships are now added to the game (based on # of players), we have MOVED one heat-printed pirate tokens from the base game to this expansion pack. Eureka!
•  Anomaly "envelopes" in Strange Signals expansion: While we are still working out the details with our manufacturer, it is our intent to include some form of reusable envelopes to store each anomaly in.  Strange Signals comes with 8 anomalies, but if all goes according to plan we would include a full 18-20 of these envelopes in Strange Signals, so you will have enough to organize all the other anomalies you'll have as well. In a sense, we are treating this Strange Signals expansion as an "anomaly storage solution" of sorts, in addition to the 8 super cool anomalies that it comes with, of course. Organization win!

A more significant proposed change

All of the component changes outlined above are tweaks based on playtesting, rules refinement, and production details, which are pretty standard types of changes for Kickstarter projects. There's one more change to cover, but this one deserves deeper explanation and some discussion with you. 

Let's start with an image that we can easily reference:

Now let's define what A, B, C, and D are here:

• A. These are the standard player heat-printed wooden ships. 4 of them come in the base game, and 1 (the white one) comes in the 5th Captain pack.
• B. These are the deluxe player heat-printed wooden ships. These WERE going to be included in the Deluxe Upgrade box (read on...). There's one for each of the 10 "Ship Front" cards. The idea was that rather than using the generic player ship token matching your player color (A), you would use the unique one that matches your ship front card (B). 
• C. These are the standard planets that come in the base game.
• D. These are proposed "marbleized" planets that COULD come in the Deluxe Upgrade (keep reading...).

So here's the discussion point: After a bunch of playtesting and deeper discussion with both fans and our internal design team, it became clear that the unique ship tokens (B) may simply not be the best "deluxe" component for this game. While they technically "work," they do create an issue during gameplay: It's harder to tell which ship piece in the system belongs to which player, because the pieces don't depict the player's actual color (like other components do). Instead, you need to "match up" the image on the ship piece with the ship front card in front of the associated player, a mental process that may just not be worth the effort. In other words, our testers and design team generally feel that they would prefer to use the generic ship pieces (A), as it's easier to keep track of who own's what during the game.

So that got us thinking...  if we were to seriously consider pulling those 10 unique ship pieces out, what would be way cooler that we could add to the Deluxe Upgrade box? That question led us to D - marbleized planets that we think would look HELLA cool on the table. The costs for the 5 marbleized planets is just about the same as the cost for the 10 ship tokens, so this would be an even swap. We don't want to include deluxe components that people won't even use, so this seemed to be a nice alternative to consider.

Please let us know below what your thoughts are!! We will ultimately make the final call that we believe the majority of backers will be happiest with, so please start letting us know your overall thoughts and opinions in the comments below.

Thanks so much for your time, and we look forward to hearing your thoughts. Cheers!

July project update - we're getting there!
almost 2 years ago – Thu, Jul 28, 2022 at 03:03:12 AM

Happy Summer!

Hope you're all staying as cool as you can during this massive heat wave (at least in New England, where I am)!

Here's a summary of where things are at...  then you can get back to your pool and margarita time!

Development Progress

Dev progress has been going REALLY well! While we still have playtesters playing the game across the globe, at this point all we're changing are the smallest of details and tweaks. Dare I say, the game design portion of this project is DONE! 

As you can see above, we've made significant progress on the rulebook layout and other graphic design elements. We've still got some work to do to finalize all the punchboard slugs and such, but we are very happy with how things have been going. 

Box Design

Here's a recent render showing the box design for the base game and deluxe upgrade boxes:

As you can see here, we've designed these boxes to "fit together," just as the game cards for the ship fronts, upgrades, and backs seamlessly fit together. The Strange Signals box will also connect in perfectly, with different ship upgrades visible on each of its 4 sides. Finally, each box has its own distinctive coloring with their background nebula designs, while still seamlessly connecting to one another. 

Call it a brilliant retail marketing move, call it a gimmick...  whatever the case, we love it!

Dyson Sphere

The Dyson Sphere is 1 of the 18 available anomalies, and it's one that comes in the base game box. We always wanted this to be somewhat 3 dimensional in nature, and we've recently completed its design and the associated "cut lines" files. Here's a couple renders showing it off in all its cosmic glory:

This design offers that sense of cosmic rings surrounding the sun, while not getting in the way of dropping objects. Now let's forge some hammers!

Crew Tiles

There are a couple anomalies that include the concept of crew, not to be confused with passengers. We've finalized the design for these crew tiles, as you can see here: 

These will be thick punchboard tiles, just like the captain tiles. We can't wait to make wider use of crew tiles in future expansions!

GenCon next week!

If you're headed to Indianapolis next week, please do stop by Phase Shift's booth #271! We'll be showing off Dungeon Drop's "Fearless Fellowship" full coop mode, as well as the base game, Wizards & Spells, Tavern Tales, and all our various mini-expansions and promo packs. We hope to see you soon!

Cheers!

June project update
almost 2 years ago – Sun, Jun 19, 2022 at 03:46:35 AM

Happy June!

Wanted to get out a project status update to you all and let you know where things are at. Let's get to it!

Bottom line up front

As I indicated last month, our project is behind, but still making tremendous progress with each passing week. I've pulled together a chart that will help you all see exactly where the different aspects of the project are at, so you can follow along as you so desire:

For a project of this magnitude, these are fairly normal progress levels - the rulebook is classically one of the last items to be tackled, and once we wrestle that to the ground things should proceed relatively quick from then on.

Why are the Space Walls so low on the progress meter? Simple - that's the LAST piece of artwork we're waiting to come in, and once we have it we need to do some fancy shmancy stuff to it! We don't want to give away all our upcoming pizazz, so for now just know that we intend to add some wicked cool special effects to those bad boys!

Playtesting

This is probably the SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT thing we do as a publishing company. Seriously...  at the end of the day, no matter how great a product looks, or how inexpensive it may be, what keeps a game alive for the long term is GAMEPLAY. To that end, we have not been lax. Much the opposite, this is precisely why we are currently behind schedule. 

The above pic was taken on our Phase Shift retreat a couple weekends ago. 4 of us spent nearly 72 hours straight playing Drop Drive back to back to back! We played EVERY SINGLE anomaly, which is not easy to do considering there are 18 of them, and not every game has anomalies in play. 

Therein lies the complexity that has demanded this level of playtesting effort - because of the "infinite" nature of the real-world/spatial game model, we needed to test for countless cases and edge-cases, considering how every permutation of game rule and component plays with one another. Of course we experienced this same reality with Dungeon Drop before, but make no mistake - Drop Drive required even more comprehensive testing due to the "open sandbox" nature of the game itself.

Here's Scott wracking his brain on some of the finer aspects we were struggling with, and of course Tim doing his best Jim Halpert impression!:

Seriously, we had a BLAST on the retreat, and the best news we could possibly give you is the fact that after almost 3 full days of playing this game non-stop, we still love each and every play! The games are so varied, so rich, and so unique, and the 18 anomalies only serve to amp that replayability up to 11!!

Here's some closeups (keep in mind this is all still prototype level components). The first one has a Mr. Darkness token emerging from behind the sun, relentlessly moving toward and seeking to destroy the ancient temple at the yellow Primals planet:

Here you can see some prototype asteroid belts featuring the chain of Belter's Bazaar stations amongst the giant asteroids!:

And finally, we're now able to perform our final playtests on the very kiosks that we will feature at cons coming up...  how gorgeous is this?!:

Artwork

Our art studio is just about done churning out the latest art we needed for this game, including the 18 different anomalies. Here are some of the latest pieces for your viewing pleasure:

In there you can see a bunch of new ship upgrades, the Dropgate, an ancient temple (top-down view), a sand-worm larva specimen, and of course some adorable Twibbles! These are just some of the many unique pieces that can be found in the 18 different anomalies available for Drop Drive.

As mentioned above, one of the last pieces of art we're waiting on is the Space Walls, and we can't wait to start playing with some awesome special effects for those!

Rules

Of course, throughout all this constant playtesting we've been doing, we've also taken every opportunity to refine the core rules. It's always great when we can cut out an unnecessary rule, and it's even greater when we find a solution to one problem that actually helps in another area we've also struggled with. This has happened more than once in our latest round of testing!

To that end, I can't begin to tell you how excited we all are about some of the more recent improvements we've made to the core rules. Some quick examples:

• In our last update, we told you how we finally nailed the ship to ship encounters. Because of where that landed, we realized we could now go back to an earlier goal we had somewhat abandoned - making ship combat offer both great risk and great reward potential. Adding too much risk to battle was something we were very hesitant about before, since we had no way for a weaker ship to avoid getting into battle, potentially able to be "bullied." The new ship encounter system has some built-in mechanisms that alleviate this concern, leaving us with a thrilling combat system that can result in many different outcomes. 
• Something we're ridiculously excited about is how we simplified pirate activations. We took out what was previously an entire "phase" during the planet landing procedures, where it bogged down planet landing with this tedious process to move each and every pirate in the system. We recently transformed this into a much lighter, yet more organic model. Now each player moves the pirate matching their own color at the start of each of their turns - this is far easier to manage, far quicker to execute, and it keeps the system constantly alive and ever-changing. 
• We added a simple but important ability: You can now use a fuel to re-roll any die roll. Think of this as "more power to shields" or "transfer auxiliary power to weapons!" It's such a simple addition, but one that does several things: It gives more uses for Fuel, which was previously less valuable than other cargo overall, and it provides more organic ways to shake up battle and other phases, possibly evening the odds for weaker ships facing off against a battle beast!

And so on. Needless to say, we've been using our time very wisely, and the final result will speak for itself. The rulebook is already well written, but next step is to get it laid out with example images and such, so that is now on the shorter term horizon. 

Closing

We hope you continue to love what you see, and we're always here to answer any questions you may have. Until next time, have fun gaming!!

May project update
almost 2 years ago – Sat, May 07, 2022 at 04:28:26 AM

Good evening!

We're happy to once again give you a full understanding of where this project is currently at. Like the last update, we have a lot to share, so let's get on to it!

Project Status Up Front

Before we get to the good stuff, some quick but important up front details on the overall project status...

Now that Darrin and his family are back in their house, after a full year of living out of an apartment due to his house fire, he's finally able to devote some real Graphic Design time to this project (as you will see in some of the comps below). We have more to do still, but it's awesome to be getting to the final versions of many of these game components!

That said, I do not want to sugar coat this fact: We are a couple months BEHIND schedule. I could cite Covid impacts, China shutdowns, shipping woes, Darrin's housing situation, or countless other items outside our control, but ultimately none of that really matters. What matters is we know where this project is at, and we know what work we have remaining. And here's the most important point I want to make: We will NOT compromise on the game's quality or level of refinement. We will continue to flesh out and refine the rules, cards, abilities, graphic design, art, components, anomaly details, and so on, until everything is TOP NOTCH. You deserve nothing less. 

To that end, we do have FINAL art coming in from our studio now, we have FINAL graphic design coming in from Darrin, we have FINAL rules tweaks coming in from Scott and myself, and we are working very hard every day to pull all of this together into the final product that will KNOCK YOUR SOCKS OFF! So, please accept our apologies that we are behind schedule, but please rest assured it's because we are not (and will never) push something out that's not truly ready to be mass produced. 

Now let's move on to the fun stuff!

Explore Card Graphic Design

In the last update, we explained how we had refined the wording and balanced all the effects of the 3 types of Explore cards. This time, we want to show you the final graphic design for each of the three card types:

As you can see above, all Explore cards now have the planet of origin in the upper left, a new treatment for the vitals above each of the Specimen canisters, and a heavily cleaned up and simplified look for the Passenger cards. We are IN LOVE with how these came out!

Space Mats

We are also thrilled to have near final art for our Space Mats! I say "near-final," since we are now on version 4 of the mat artwork. We've done test prints of each version thus far, and frustratingly there have been notable issues with the printing of the black parts that we've had to carefully navigate. We believe this final comp is damn close to final, and we're proud to share it with you. Keep in mind that each mat is 28x14 inches, so the image below shows TWO of the mats back to back, as you would have during play:

Captain Tiles and Encounters

Last update, we told you about the struggle we were having with ship encounter rules, and we're finally thrilled with where we landed!

To give you a little more background, here's the complete set of criteria we were trying to hit:

• We wanted a unified system for ALL ship encounters, whether those pirate or player encounters.
• Likewise, we wanted a unified system for all battles. We didn't want battle to work one way for pirate encounters and a different way for player encounters. 
• We wanted a system that would allow for both ship damage and loss of / stolen cargo, but the trick was balancing this so PVP doesn't take over the entire game.
• We wanted a system that offered both players in an encounter a choice, so it really feels like an ENCOUNTER, and not just a mechanical chore.

After a LOT of different systems and a ton of playtests, we landed on a sublime outcome! Here's the synopsis:

•  ENCOUNTERS: When two ships encounter one another in space, the active player makes a choice: Approach the other ship with Hailing Frequencies or Arm Weapons. The other ship chooses to respond to that choice with their own choice (if being hailed, they can either Open a Channel or go to Battle Stations; if responding to a ship arming weapons, they can either Surrender or go to Battle Stations). Of course there are pros and cons to each choice, on both sides. This layered choice model makes for some very interesting encounter potential and decision making, and those decisions will be different as the game progresses, based on the organic nature of game dynamics and the current condition of the various ships. Note that pirates (not directly controlled by a player) will always "respond" in a standard way, but the active player still has a choice on how to approach them.
•  BATTLE: Any time a choice results in Battle Stations, a standard battle will ensue. Both players roll a die and add their bonus. Some players will have added battle effects from upgrades, such as an option to reroll and so on.  The DIFFERENCE in the two rolls determine the winner AND how much damage is dealt...  read on...
•  DAMAGE (TO PLAYERS): When battling another ship, if your roll is lower than the opponent's roll, you take X damage where X = the difference. Damage on your ship is soaked by your ship upgrades: For each point of damage, you must flip an upgrade over (it is not able to be used until repaired at a planet, in place of Exploring the surface). If there is any damage that was not soaked by ship upgrades, the attacker steals ONE cargo from your hold. 
•  DAMAGE (TO PIRATES): Pirate ships taking damage works the same way as players, with two clarifications: Pirate ships do not have ship upgrades, so they cannot soak any damage; and Pirate ships have reckless captains, so EACH point of damage results in loss of 1 cargo (stolen by the attacker). Hence, attacking Pirates will likely net greater rewards than attacking other players, but both are possible and lucrative. 

With these details organized and unified, we now have Captain Tiles that show a unique starting bonus on one side, and a summary of the above encounter rules on the other side:

Anomalies

Last but certainly not least, we have our Anomaly progress. A couple things we want to cover today: Two more elements we added to every Anomaly, and a full understanding of how the 8 Anomalies in the Strange Signals expansion will work (4 of which were completely community driven).

Last update, we told you about how we separated "Short Range Scan" effects from "Long Range Scan" effects for every Anomaly, allowing you to decide before the game starts (or even as the game progresses) if you want to employ a quicker way to resolve some Anomalies. Check out the previous update for more details on that...

Now we are introducing 2 additional elements to each Anomaly:

•  Alternate / Start of Game setup rules: Every Anomaly now has a Short Range Scan effect, Long Range Scan effect, and a new Alternate setup option that allows you to have the Anomaly in play from the very start of the game! This will allow your group to decide, for example, that you absolutely want to play the next game with the Dropgate Anomaly (and possibly additional Anomalies), right from the start. This does not prohibit you from including the 3 Anomaly tokens, which can still be explored to bring additional Anomalies into play during the course of the game...  and then of course you can decide that some of those will be the full long-range scan effect and the rest would use the shorter short-range scan effects. This gives you TONS of flexibility, and of course we will offer fleshed out "game mode" suggestions in the rules to help get you started. 
•  Complexity scale: This is a simple addition that has no inherent mechanics associated. Each Anomaly has a complexity rating depicted to the left of the Anomaly title (a simple scale from 1 to 3, with 3 being the most complex). You can use this to further tailor your own games...  for example, you may decide that any anomaly with a complexity of 2 or 3 will only employ the Short Range effect, due to limited time available, or you may decide to shuffle all the complexity 3 Anomalies together and have one of them come out at the start of the game, drawing only from the remaining simpler ones during the game. Whatever the case, we're giving you the added tools to tailor your own sandbox game to your heart's desire!! Note that all the anomalies in the base game have a complexity 1 or 2, and the Strange Signals expansion has a mix of complexity 2 and 3...  this makeup is very intentional on both sides.  

To say we're taking these Anomalies seriously is a MASSIVE understatement. And with that, we're proud to show you where the 8 Anomalies in the Strange Signals expansion have landed...  PLEASE KEEP IN MIND that we are still only showing you PROTOTYPE ART for each of these, as the studio has not yet delivered final art for these various tiles, cards, and tokens:

Wrapping up

Phew - that's a lot again! We hope you love what you see, and please do tell us in the comments below what your favorite part of this update is! What are you most excited to learn, and what are you most eager to see next?...  

With that, have a fantastic week, and we'll see you at our next update!

Cheers!!

Drop Drive development progress
about 2 years ago – Wed, Mar 09, 2022 at 11:33:40 PM

Good evening!

We have been heads down making sure Drop Drive delivers the most otherworldly gaming experience possible, and we wanted to take a moment to come up for some air and show you what we've been working on. So, in no particular order, here we go!

PLEASE NOTE: Darrin is just now getting his family moved back home following last year's house fire. Darrin is our primary Graphic Designer, so everything you see below still needs to go through a full "Darrin treatment" over the weeks to come. Please forgive my own humble attempt at making workable prototypes! ;)

Planet Balance and Planetary Facilities

EDGEWORLDS: If you recall, during the campaign we only showed the "Homeworld" side of the planets, but we indicated there would be "Edgeworld" variations on the flipside of each planet, featuring varying market demands and unique Planetary Facilities. These have now been fully fleshed out and tested. Here are some examples:

PLANETARY FACILITIES: You can see the Planetary Facility effects in the center on the right (and of course, better Graphic Design will come soon!). The idea is that after you sell your asteroids to the market, you can then choose to make use of the Planetary Facility. As you can see, the effects can be fairly interesting and impactful!

DAMAGE AND REPAIR: Another thing you may notice in the image above is that the Explore step has now been combined with a new Repair option. We recently added Ship Damage to the game (you can become damaged via Pirate attacks, some Captain Encounters, and various Anomaly effects). When you become Damaged, you must flip over one of your Ship Upgrade cards (rendering them useless until you Repair). If you have none, then you must discard something (an Explore card, a Cargo, or a Space Coin). When you land on a planet, you can decide to either Explore the Surface (drawing new Explore cards) OR Repair your Ship (flipping all Damaged Ship Upgrades to their normal side). This provides some tension and new opportunities for strategic choice.

Captain Tiles and Encounters

One area we've been spending a lot of time recently on is the Captain Encounters system. You may remember that we implemented a mechanic modeled after the popular "Prisoner's Dilemma" (as the picture above depicts). With this approach, when two Captains meet in space, they would each secretly choose their "posture," either Hostile or Peaceful. Then players reveal simultaneously, and each would gain the benefit or penalty based on what both they and their opponent chose. 

We were completely in love with this approach on one level, but as we tested the game more, this mechanic started to feel a little out of place - almost as if it was a mini-game on its own, and perhaps didn't belong in THIS game. 

Make no mistake, we are not yet done analyzing and fleshing this out. We do know what we ultimately want - we want players to be able to encounter one another in space, having a brief opportunity for small amounts of trade and/or skirmish (but not too punishing a skirmish). We're trying variations and simplifications to the original model outlined above, but we're also trying out other models whereby each Captain may simply be able to choose from a couple different effects whenever they encounter another player. 

We're not sure where this will ultimately land, but rest assured, we will make sure the final system is both compelling and simple to execute, a core tenet of our overall design philosophy!

Drop Drive Ratings

Next up we have the core Drop Drive ratings on the Ship Front cards. Originally, these ratings were simple numbers, indicating how many "links" (using our special Nav Tool) above the table you needed to drop your ship from. In practice, this became a bit more tedious than we intended, and the actual bounce volatility was not quite as influenced by that rating as we had hoped. 

Therefore, we are now trying out a new system, and so far it's having a great effect on gameplay and seems much more fun and interesting in the process:

As you can see above, rather than just a number in that first box, there would be some collection of icons (again, ACTUAL icons will come later - these are just temporary placeholders). The icons indicate WHERE you can drop your ship in space, from a standard height of 3 to 6 inches (similar to Dungeon Drop). The ship on the left can only choose to drop over the Sun or any Planet, whereas the ship on the right has many more options, able to drop over any Ship (player or pirate) or any Cargo drifting in space. 

As with everything, this needs to be fully tested and refined, but early testing has proven this to be much easier and faster to execute, and much more fun and interesting to decide where you want to drop in to space.

Explore Card Balance and Refinement

Of course our main deck of Explore cards continues to undergo much refinement. We haven't needed to make any sweeping changes to the deck of recent, but we have absolutely been tweaking the balance of the various cards, ability wording, and so on. 

One thing we did was a special consideration pass for the Passengers. We made sure that each Passenger's effect could be executed instantly, during the actual Drop Off Passengers step, rather than having some effects trigger during later phases of the landing procedures. This was important from a game flow and cleanliness perspective. The actual Passenger effects remained largely unchanged thematically, just how they were worded and timed was optimized. Good improvements overall!

Anomalies

Yeah yeah - clearly we saved the best for last! The Anomalies really represent the bread and butter of our development and playtesting efforts, with more still to come. We have made tremendous progress, and there has been a key improvement we wanted to let you all in on!...

One thing we struggled with was how to "control" the timing of when Anomalies are discovered throughout the game. Obviously, with this being a "sandbox" game, we cannot actually control when the players would explore Anomalies in the game, nor would we want to. But, we felt compelled to consider what should happen if an Anomaly is only explored toward the end of the game...  it seems like it would be a waste to expect players to pause and set up a more in depth module, such as the Spice planet, with only 1 or 2 turns remaining for players to actually engage with it. So we started to wonder if the various Anomalies should somehow be classified according to speed or complexity, possibly separating the randomization deck into two smaller decks - the simpler Anomalies would be saved for the latter half of the game. But, this approach would increase setup complexity, and it also feels forced and artificial. We prefer things being fluid and organic!

So...  that led us down a different path, one I think will be super well received...  and it has already tested out brilliantly! EVERY Anomaly now has a "Short Range Scan" effect, and a "Long Range Scan" effect. The Long Range Scan effect is essentially what you already know and understand from the campaign (the more interesting, in depth, and thematic rulesets, utilizing special components). But now each Anomaly card also has a new Short Range Scan effect, which is essentially a super simple and "instant" version of the Long Range Scan. Here are some examples:

As you can see, the Short Range Scan effects will be written out right on the Anomaly cards, with NO OTHER COMPONENTS needed to execute them. The Long Range Scan effects will all reference a separate rules sheet/card, and very commonly will bring new components into the game (new models, tokens, etc.). 

So the idea is that there will be different game mode options, which the group can decide on at the start. For example: 

• STARTER / SHORT GAME: All 3 Anomalies will utilize only the Short Range Scan effect. Easy!
• NORMAL GAME: The first 2 Anomalies explored will utilize the Long Range Scan effect, and the 3rd one will use the Short Range Scan effect.
• EPIC GAME: All 3 Anomalies will utilize the Long Range Scan effect, and after exploring each one another 2 Market Demand cubes are added to the game (extending the game length, allowing the Anomalies to be interacted with more).

These are just examples we're playing with, but I think they're roughly accurate. One alternative we could consider for the NORMAL GAME is that you choose which Anomaly effect to use based on how far along the game is - if half or more of the Market Demand cubes have been used, the Short Range Scan effect occurs, otherwise the Long Range Scan effect is used. 

Bottom line - this approach increases the content we're adding into the game, it gives a tremendous way to balance out the gameplay and length, and it allows the game to scale organically based on players' actual choices in the game. We're simply stoked with how this is working out!

Closing

Indeed, that's a lot of stuff! We are feeling ABSOLUTELY GREAT about where our development and testing efforts have taken us. Yes, we have more to do, but we are really starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel now.

What's your favorite part of this update? What change has you most excited? Let us know in the comments, and we'll look forward to talking with you more soon. Thanks!!