Yeah, I backed this. Really excited about getting my hands on these games, even if it’s going to be difficult to find players.
OMG I missed the KS update about BIOS Megafauna. That looks awesome. Just had to pre-order direct from the website.
A story that seems to fully encapsulate the kind of game that High Frontier is: I was just checking up on something in the living rulebook on Google Docs. And Phil Eklund happened to be in the middle of editing the exact section of the 200 page document I was trying to read.
We played two games of this yesterday. First a basic game, and then an advanced game with slingshots, support components, gigawatt thrusters and radiation. But leaving out some other modules like politics or solar storms. In retrospect it might have made sense to include Bernals.
The support components seem like an absolutely mandatory addition once everyone has a basic understanding of the game. Designing a matching ship + mission combination is the most interesting part of the game, and that gets a lot more interesting when you have to juggle double the pieces. It also means you need to do a lot more trips between LEO and the outer system: with the basic components it’s usually not too hard to be able to build a Robonaut and Refinery in your first colony, which means you pretty much just make one trip to the Asteroid belt to start off with, but any further expansion is totally self-contained
Too bad that the support components make the special ability of the corporate faction totally OP. Everyone else is really constrained by the bidding hand limit, and usually have to boost a ton of mediocre junk to space. Can’t sell the cards until you know which ship you’re actually building, can’t buy the cards for the whole ship due to the hand limit. So you either boost things you end up not using, build a suboptimal ship, or get super lucky. The corporate faction special ability means they just get to sidestep all of this by collecting up a dozen patents, and building their dream ship. And then repeat the same problem as people try to gather the components for a stack that can be manufactured fully in space.
My biggest concern with High Frontier as a game (rather than as a super-nerdy space exploration experience) is the huge amount of randomness involved in the first mission. Fail the prospecting rolls in your target cluster, and it might as well be game over. Doing ISRU refueling and flying to another asteroid cluster will cost 10 turns.
And this risk can’t really be properly mitigated. The new 3rd edition launch/landing rules mean planets are totally useless for anything except generating points. And there’s just two Asteroids where you can’t be screwed over by a bad prospecting roll. Some players are just forced to take an insane gamble. (Or maybe I’m missing some plausible first missions. E.g. Jupiter’s moons would be fine for some factions; but can you really pull that off directly from LEO with just terrestrial tech?)
Seems like with the 2nd edition rules you’d have more viable starting options.
The pacing is kind of odd too. You spend a ton of time in inconsequential early game auctions, the game starts to get going, and then it stops before anyone has really done much more than gotten a foothold in the outer solar system. Maybe you really need to play with the advanced endgame module? Though it claims to only add an hour to the game, so I’m a bit doubtful about how much more development one would manage to do.
Yes.
Your description is that of an incomplete game. While the modules are there and can be plugged and unplugged, once you add one single advanced module, the design of the game is really balanced towards adding all of them. Stuff like the difficulty to recover from bad early rolls is mitigated by playing with futures endgame and having a 60+ turn game. Playing without the endgame module does mean that the game suddenly finishes. Be a use it was supposed to go on for a while.
It is actually when you play such a game and observe your economic machine and GW thruster allowing you to do in one turn what you before needed 10+ turns to do that the game shines.
But the endgame module adding one our to the game is bs, unless you are playing with a bunch of people that know the game really well (and the bidding wars would then take more time).