Your Daily High Frontier
Another day of diddling over this game. I set it up in the morning, did a dozen turns at a sitting (about 15 minutes), walked away, did another between chores or projects or whatever. It’s a good way to play, but I need to keep notes.
My goal of winning the CEO scenario a different way than the first bore fruit! My starting patents pointed vaguely toward the asteroids (lots of C cards but also some vital S and V patents), so instead of Mars I poked around out there instead. One of the even-chance worlds came up bust, boo hoo, but it forced me to recalibrate and head over to Ceres. Both asteroid fields have quite a lot of water, which I’ve figured out is totally core to winning the CEO game (and probably the multiplayer game) no matter what: colonists and actions absolutely, positively matter. You need a big team to do big things.
My other big adjustment was to get obsessive about the possible random events that can really ruin your day. When budget cuts are possible, I had no cards “in hand” to be discarded — boosted them all to L4, even if it hurt. If there were solar flares, hunker down inside my Bernal or go hull-down on a body somewhere. Keep humans with my stacks at all times to avoid glitches. Just a full-court press against the dumb random shit. Probably a good practice no matter what.
I industrialized Ceres and most of the surrounding bodies, flew my Bernal out there, and attracted all the colonists I could (4 of them!). This seems like a pretty healthy midgame: lots of actions, a Bernal with dirtside factories, and a hand of cards that match my production capabilities. Money was easy, production was easy (although I had to zip between two different fields because one vital bit of gear I could only fabricate on the other side), it seemed like a pretty smooth path.
My endgame this time was to build a huge terawatt colony ship with colonists from each of the three specializations (engineers, scientists, bureaucrats) and send them out of the solar system with a ton of extra fuel. I had a bead on a second Future as well: 10 water at my dirtsides. I gambled and failed on that one, but it was a longshot. But! I got to experiment with mobile factories and even a little on-the-fly 3D printing (you can exchange any given kind of card — S or V or C or whatever — for another card because your freighter just prints it up!) and zipped out of the solar system via Jupiter-Sol-Jupiter mega-slingshot right under the wire. Ended the game with a “very good” score of 18 points beyond my accumulated minimum, in about 84 years of play.
I’m still not feeling mobile factories but they sure are interesting. The asteroids are almost certainly the right place for them, since they can take off and land without issue on the small bodies. It was even kind of handy being able to nudge my fabricated bits closer to my big industrialized center around Ceres.
I kind of have a goal now to, somehow, play through all the endgames eventually. There are a lot of them.
So… is this game any good?
Hard to say. It’s long. It’s a brain worm. I can get obsessive, obviously.
I don’t know that I can recommend it to anyone who doesn’t like those things.
I’ve also played it enough that the extrapolated-gripping-narrative has worn a bit thin as you can tell. It’s there in my head! But I’m kind of worn out from nerd astronomy fanfic.
You ever get comfortable with Vassal? Honestly i’m not sure at this point of the brainwave capacity to read up on this game. Still I would be interested to hear if the game holds up online. I did a stint of “A Distant Plain” marathons on vassal solitaire mode. Found it pretty enjoyable.
Oh not really. I’ve tried it on tabletop simulator as well and the card handling is too hard.