High Frontier

High Frontier

The full meal deal today: no weakling “quick start,” combat rules in play, aiming for Futures. We’re not quite smooth enough players to make it a quick game.

I keep thinking I’m getting good at the game, and I’m improving for sure, but dang…it’s hard to be tactical. I strongly suspect our early games are mind numbingly slow as we toddle toward better card sets. Whenever I read play reports, you know…the good players sound so good! I’m sure the same thing happens with rpg reports out of good groups.

One good thing we’re figuring out is some ad hoc collaboration, stuff like fabricating advanced tech and then trading it around. It’s neat! Less neat once you’ve left Earth forever for the greener pastures of Callisto.

EDIT 1: About four hours into play, I finally hit my stride and maybe found a game breaking advantage: once you’ve gathered lots of water, you can hire lots of colonists and then the extra actions start to stack up in a bad way. I’ve got five actions and the folks behind me have 2 or 3.

EDIT 2: At hour six I’m ready to step up to the terawatt thruster game. Need to haul one more piece of hardware from Earth to support it but it so close I can taste it.

Seriously, this game gets me so amped up! 

EDIT 3: I’ve got an ultratech lab doing unethical things on the back side of Europa. They built me my terawatt thruster, then upgraded my genetic engineers into “blue goo sybonts.” Those things want to find life in deep space, so now we’re industrializing the Jovian Trojans in search of our Future.

That was pretty easy. Headed to my second future, which looks crazy-hard on paper.

EDIT 4: We’ve officially hit burnout for two of the three players at hour 9. The end is in sight, I’m probably going to win, and we’re kind of going through the motions. It feels quite a lot more like a traditional optimal-point-salad game here at the end, other players gaming out how many points they can squeeze in before I finish my second Future.

Ah well, it’s been a good run. I finally got to play the full meal deal, no holds barred, and it only took about…80 hours of intense play and who knows how many hours of study.

I could have earned a master’s by now. 🤤

EDIT 5: I ended up losing anyway! And I’ve got thoughts I’ll share later, now that we’ve seen the complete endgame up close and personal.