EmDo: ESC + EXO

I have been playing a lot of Eminent Domain: Exotica lately (I believe I've mentioned this). Before I started on Exotica, I had been playing a lot of Escalation - but I haven't even touched that since November. The other night my roommate and I decided to combine the two expansions, and include the Exotica card subset that's for use with Escalation...

Ho-ly crap... that was some deep waters! So much different tech! Exotica is a much smaller expansion than Escalation was, and I recall the first couple of times I played Escalation - despite having played over 100 games of EmDo, I really felt like I was exploring strategies and figuring stuff out again. Exotica is much more focused on the Exotic planets/symbols and on the Asteroids, where Escalation adds a ton of new tech cards and dynamics. Adding the two together once again gave me that feeling of wonder and exploration. So many options!

At first John and I postulated that maybe we should have added the 4 cards from each stack back into the game (remember, with the expansions, you remove 4 cards from each stack in a 2 player game). But it turned out that we managed to get a good amount of stuff done. We played 2 games, and neither one felt turn-short to me, so I'm happy with the number of cards in each stack.

John hit me twice with a new card called Create Chaos - which made me discard my hand, and then draw 2 cards as reparations. When he bought the card I gambled a little and decided not to discard any cards from my bad hand. I had just reshuffled, and didn't want to draw my tech cards only to lose them to John's Chaos. He, suspecting that, opted not to play it the following turn, which meant I had a sub-par turn. Rather than repeat that, I went ahead and discarded some useless cards the next turn, drew my good tech, and then lost it to the Chaos. A pretty neat exchange really, and with the 2 card Reparations (and the card from dissenting John's role), I was still able to do something useful on my turn. I like this card, though I could see potentially increasing the Reparations to 3 cards.

That might have been the only Exo-Esc card that really saw any play. I'm pretty sure we'll have to play a lot of games before everything makes an appearance. Oh, I did buy a card called Mimic, which copied John's level 3 Adaptability... though I didn't actually use that effect at all. I have 2 versions of that card, a L2 and a L3 version. Not sure which one I want to go with. L2 seems neat, since it gives you access to a L3 ability, but only if an opponent buys one.

The Exotic stack Peace Treaty may have come into play, but that's not really "new" - I'm familiar with how Peace treaty works ;) Similarly, the Exotic stack Double Times came into play, as expected.

In largely unrelated news, I had created a card for the diverse stack in the EXO set - a permanent called Space Station which counts as an asteroid. It has not seen any play yet, and I suspect that's because 1 Asteroid isn't super exciting. I might try upping that to "counts as 2 asteroids" - that way it'll combo with all the Asteroidal tech.

Anyway, it was an interesting night, and I look forward to playing more of the combined EXO-ESC expansion sets :)