Eminent Domain Origins - final playtest phase

Starting Resources (and turn order advantage)

It's been over a year since my last post about Eminent Domain Origins, and one of the last things I was trying out was a starting resource draft. Inspired by Mark Major's Chimera Station, I thought it could be fun to mix up the starting resources in the game by drafting starting resource cards. Rather than draft them in reverse turn order though, I decided to make a subset of cards for 1st player, 2nd-3rd player, and 4th-5th player, and deal out 2 of those cards to each player based on their turn order. You can choose one of the two for your starting resources.

I had played a couple of 3 player games with these new starting resource cads, and yesterday I finally got the game to the table again, and we tried them one more time. So far they have worked out well, and I think I have mix I'm happy about (for up to 3 players anyway, I haven't tested the 4-5p ones yet). I hadn't made physical cards for the 4-5p ones yet, and I had forgotten what I'd wanted to try, so yesterday I thought of what might be a good mix:

* 40 credits
* 30 credits and 1 energy
* 20 credits and 1 crystal
* 20 credits and Additional Module Slots tech
* Afterburner module
* Upgraded Cargo Hold module (holds 2 resources or 1 colony marker)

I thought the Afterburner might be crazy, but then realized that in order to take advantage of it, you'd have to buy and charge shields, which means you'd have to do a delivery first. So after a few turns you could get your starting Afterburner online, and you'd have to "stop for gas" every once in a while to keep it going. I actually think it is valuable, but won't be overpowered after all. Looking at my previous post now, I see that I had a similar thought a year ago :)

An Upgraded Cargo Hold sounds potentially problematic as well, but I doubt it will turn out to be overpowered either. I hadn't thought of this before, but I like the idea of it better than what I had originally written (Cargo Hold + 10 credits, and Cryo Chamber + 10 credits).

Because of early turn order advantage (dibs on the early game colonies nearby the Terra Prime space station, and potentially 1 more turn over the course of the game), the starting resource cards scale up for later turn order players. I am certain that turn order advantage early in the game, and unequal turns at the end, are the types of things players will key into, and therefore turn order compensation is warranted. One thing players don't necessarily notice as often is the inherent DISadvantage for early turn players in a game where you don't know for sure whether you'll get another turn, which is the case here as well. Between this inherent disadvantage, the partial credit for resources and colony markers on your ship at game end, and the turn order compensation, I figure the game is (and looks) well balanced enough that no particular turn order is really advantaged over another.

Setup and exploring the Green zone

One of the things I didn't like about the new exploration tiles was that in the Green zone, most of them are blank. It's not fun to "explore" an area, flip up a tile, and find nothing. Last year my notes suggest I was considering putting weak hazards, like single asteroids, or even boons, like pieces of crystal (FKA brownium) for players to find. However, that exacerbates any early turn order advantage. And while it may be neat to find a wormhole right outside the door of the space station, when that happens it really distorts the map, making that entrance much more heavily traveled, and with it, the player(s) whose early colonies are on that side of the board are more heavily used.

I thought of an alternative, and tried it out yesterday... I can just GET RID of the green exploration tiles altogether! Instead, I can just have 1 tile with a wormhole that gets placed on the center green hex (the only one without a direct route to Terra Prime). To be honest, this doesn't really reduce setup very much, you still need to lay out the space hexes, and put exploration tiles on the yellow and red ones. However, it makes the game a little less fiddly (no flipping tiles to reveal nothing), and a little more consistent with the standard placement of the wormhole.

Wormhole physics

Speaking of wormholes, I'd originally used a rule that for 1 move action, you could move into a wormhole, and for another move action, you could move out of ANY wormhole on the board. A few key points about this was that it required a MOVE action, not an EXPLORE action, so players could not legally exit a wormhole at a sector with 2 face down tiles. This maintained a dynamic wherein you NEVER could be in a situation where you were flipping 2 tiles at once. To be honest, I kind of liked that rule, but it did lead to a little bit of confusion at times, and players frequently conflated MOVE and EXPLORE actions, and therefore asked about flipping 2 tiles at once coming out of a wormhole. David Short insisted that while you shouldn't be able to flip 2 tiles at once, you SHOULD be able to flip 1 when coming out of a wormhole, which he held was consistent with a turn where you weren't coming out of a wormhole... that would translate to the rule "you can move or explore out of a wormhole, but not to a sector with 2 face down tiles." I did not agree that that was more consistent (I didn't like the exception clause), but it definitely made clear that some people would try to do that.

A year ago, I decided to simplify the game by basically combining MOVE and EXPLORE into the same action. No more limit of 1 Explore per turn, if you move into a sector with a face down tile, you simply flip it up. This sped the game up a bit, and didn't really harm it any, but it brought up the issue of flipping 2 tiles at once coming out of a wormhole... I decided to try allowing that, and so far it hasn't really been a problem. Exploring comes with it's own risks (encountering aliens or asteroids) anyway. The question is bound to come up: "in what order do you resolve the tiles?" -- I will probably say in the rulebook that you flip them over and resolve them one at a time, however in reality, I don't think there's ever a conflict. Undoubtedly, someone will ask "what if I flip an alien and an asteroid at the same time?" But that's actually already answered if you play the rules as written: When revealing a stray asteroid, you immediately roll to evade them. When revealing aliens you do nothing immediately. At the end of the action, if you are adjacent to aliens, then they attack you. Even though this is clearly defined in the rules already, I will likely address it specifically, perhaps in an example, because I've learned that people have a tendency to conflate or misinterpret rules.

Another change I made at that time was to allow movement into and then out of a wormhole in the same action. This was to speed things up a little bit, and to avoid questions involving ships being "in wormholes" as opposed to in sectors, where they usually are. The rule was "Use 1 action to move into a wormhole and then out of any wormhole." This meant you could traverse a hex (from one corner to the opposite corner) with a wormhole in it for 1 action instead of spending 3 actions moving around the outside edge. It also meant you could jump pretty deep into space with only 1 wormhole on the board, and I had just implemented a permanent wormhole on the green zone (rather than a probable one, which could be off to one side of the board). That's not really what the wormholes were meant to do -- I wanted them to sort of shrink the board once it had been explored a bit.

Yesterday we tried a tweak on that rule: "Use 1 action to move into a wormhole and then out of any OTHER wormhole." This meant that the first wormhole (which will now be in the center of the green zone every game) doesn't really do anything at all, until a 2nd one is found. No more jumping over a hex, or using that starting wormhole to dart out into deep space! This seemed to work well, and made the wormholes behave like I'd intended -- in the midgame they start shrinking the board.

Simplified turn order / Board clutter

In Terra Prime, the first thing you do on your turn is make sure there is a resource cube at each of your colonies. If there isn't one there, you produce one. If there is, you do nothing. This way, there's only at most 1 resource at each colony, making a little bit of a race to pick them up, however you can be sure hat your own colonies will always have resources available for you on your turn. I liked that dynamic, and it was one of the points of interaction in the game (if I go after you, and I want your Green resource, you can always take it from me... which means I might have to stall or change my plans if I think you'll snake the resource I want). It was also one of the easiest things to forget in the game... your turn rolls around, and you start doing your stuff, forgetting to produce resources. It was very common, even among veteran players. It also wasn't a big deal to forget, because it was very easy to figure out at any given time whether a colony ought to have a resource on it (it would have produced on your turn, and neither you or she picked it up, so it should be there for me now).

Another issue with the production rule is when teaching the game, the first thing you say is "on your turn, you first produce a resource at each of your colonies..." only players don't know what a colony even IS yet, or how to get them! That's always been kind of sub-par.

So in an effort to do some house cleaning, I decided to try removing that portion of he turn. Instead, I've simply said you can always pick up a resource at a colony, and just limited that action to 1x/colony/turn. That way there's no need to explain production, no chance to forget to do it, and the board is a bit less cluttered.