Star Realms

Is this still the best all-purpose Star Realms thread?

I just discovered the game through some co-workers, I’ve been playing the free version on my iPad for a couple nights now (just easy/medium A.I. battles, no expansions) and I dig it!

Is there a consensus on which expansions are worth having? I’m not sure if all the physical expansions are available in the iOS version, but I’ll take recommendations for either since I’ll probably buy a real deck to play with friends.

And as for the base game, has it held up over time as pretty balanced? Are any factions or strategies dominant at high levels? I like the variety—such as I understand it so far—but I’d hate to find out that “oh no one serious ever plays X, everyone does Y now” or something.

I like all the expansions, but there’s a lot of folks who avoid Gambits and Events since they add a ton of randomness into the game. I tend to play with pretty much everything against my real-life friends (both in person and on the app) but avoid Gambits/Events when doing stuff like Slack and Facebook tournaments.

I don’t think there’s a particular strategy or set of cards that’s terribly unbalanced. Certainly there are some strong cards - Ark, Emperor’s Dreadnaught, etc - but I’ve not seen any serious concerns on that front.

You should definitely join the Slack channel to play some games online, @WhollySchmidt ! @Dave_Perkins has the joining details, I believe.

Agreed, I like all of the expansions. I avoid Gambits in tournaments. I like Events because as often as they screw me, they can also give me an edge that can bring me back from the edge of doom. They keep things interesting.

Always up for games at DennyA. And I really need to get back to the Slack channel and check in.

Only thing I don’t like is the new feature that challenges don’t affect your rating. My matches with randos are so frequently against level 40+ players that there can’t be any kind of level comparison in the matchmaking – it just be completely random with no level consideration.

I feel that Colony Wars was transformative, in that it replaced base set with something more finely balanced. Not that the original was horrible, but Colony Wars is superior.

I own all the expansions, because they are so cheap, but typically avoid Gambits. Luck-of-the-gambits can put one player in a seriously strong position and the other in a very weak one before the first turn is played.

Mostly when I play multiplayer I go for Colony Wars + Events + Heroes.

Challenge me if you want some friendly play with someone willing to correspond/offer tips during or after a game. Username Vector.

There’s a slack channel?

Payed my $5 to unlock the full core game, so online play and all that jazz, registered as CSchmidt.

I think all you need to do is go to https://qt3-leagues.slack.com/ and sign up to join the Slack craziness. If it asks you for anything more than the usual Internet registration, @Dave_Perkins is the Slackmaster!

Yeah I tried and it wants me to contact the team administrator. But I bet @Dave_Perkins could sort me out!

I just need an email, @Tortilla!

I just played for the first time tonight and shockingly love it. I’m Veloxi if anyone wants to kick my ass.

The Kickstarter for Star Realms Frontiers broke $1 million in pledges. I knew this was a popular game, but didn’t realize it was quite that popular!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1172937197/star-realms-frontiers/description

Still a few hours left if anyone still wants in.

New expansion day! On the Android app, anyway. Not sure if iOS is available yet. Also they’ve added an Arena mode, where you play games with extra rules until reaching 6 wins or 2 losses.

This is what $73 worth of Star Realms Kickstarter looks like. Frontiers finally shipped out. I’d heard they might not make it before GenCon but they just barely beat it.

Oooh, didn’t realize they were starting to arrive. Guess I’ll let you know what $132 looks like soon.

And just got my shipping notification, and it looks like it’s already out for delivery today!

Yeah, it took a good long time for them to get things designed and printed, but once they started shipping it’s gone really fast. And at least in my case, everything came as expected, no mistakes.

I think we bought exactly the same stuff? Is your price $USD?

Yep, 65 USD plus the $8 shipping.

My cards were $65, but the sleeves were $30 and the storage box was another $29. Did you get some earlier KS deal I missed?

I don’t remember details to be honest, but that’s probably it. I bought in literally on the first possible day, July 11 2017, according to the email I just looked up in my archives.