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You could have dice for the speed and strength checks and a tracking board for your upgrades – but it’s far easier to have this ship clear and plain for everyone to see, and see how many upgrades you’re amassing. I mean, the 4 of them take up about half of the box space! However, once I got to see how it worked to determine speed, strenghth and tracking, it made sense to have it be as visible as it is (which is quite). There’s no guessing to get you out of these things! I’ve seen a few of the same thing – say, space pirates – that don’t follow the exact forums as each of the other same type of card, which I was pleasantly surprised at. The player to the left will read the card out and the player will choose from a yes/no option or something like offering up between 0 and 2 cards. There’s quite a large stack of these encounter cards, and they range from basic encounters with stranded ships, space pirates, merchants and the like. At times, you may end up with a black ball that comes up in your shaker results – this means a slightly lower base speed, and having to resolve an encounter before you take the rest of your turn. If you’ve got any boosters on your ship that increase speed, add that on and then move any/all of your various ships out there into the big bad black. Whatever shows in the hopper after this will indicate your base speed. Moving out into space is handled by using the incredibly overproduced rocket you have, with a number of coloured balls inside that you’ll shake up. Take a good look through these stacks of cards before playing, so you can have them in mind when heading out for trading. But they’re a really interesting piece of the game – if you work to harmonize your resource production with the benefits of say, trading and extra production, things will really pay off. Depending on the board’s setup, you may find these easy to get to, or a little too far away to get to easily in the early-mid game. This might be something that increases your production of a particular resource, boosts your ship’s upgrades, or even offers you better trading ratios. If you are the first, or have the majority of cards from that group you’ll take the standee that represents them, and is also worth two points! Each of the cards will offer a benefit of some kind, which offsets not getting points for establishing your outpost. You also have the option of taking a trade ship out, in order to establish an outpost at one of the four alien bases, which establishes friendship for you and that particular group. (Freeing it up to become another spot that produces resources for colonies built adjacently.) Resources are not just used to establish colonies, trade outposts and spaceports - you’ll also be turning them into boosters, cannons and freight pods, upgrades that will respectively boost your speed, strength and ability to establish trade or liberate an ice planet. If you’re hauling a colony ship, you can establish that somewhere out there in order to up your chances of getting a handful of good resources most turns. You’ll expand out into the system by moving with ships - so rather than building roads, you’ll spend movement points each turn to head out along the expansive board to reveal new production values on planet tiles. Players start the game with a number of colonies (akin to settlements), a spaceport (allowing the launch of ships) and one colony ship (a colony piece transported by a rocket). There are options for variable set-ups for folks who play enough to need a fresher approach and want to change things up for a challenge. When you dive in for the first time, you’re going to want to use the suggested set up that comes in the rule book – a helpful guide for those just familiarizing themselves with the game. All of these things have been tailored to suit the setting of space very particularly in Starfarers and it’s impressive how well it all comes together. The closest comparison I can think of is Catan: Seafarers – there’s some transporting around the board, discovering resource tiles when you approach them, and (at a stretch) pirates. While the basics of Catan are the framework to the game, there’s some fun new parts of gameplay and strategy that give this enough distance from the franchise to be a solid choice to try. If you’re like me, you may be expecting “Catan, but literally just in space instead” out of Starfarers.