An expansion for Exodus - II. Technologies (part 2)

Last week I started presenting the new technologies in the upcoming expansion of Exodus: Proxima Centauri and today I am going to continue to talk about techs in the second article on this topic. 

Technologies in the base game

Space Combat

The Tachyon Scanner is another powerful type of development for space combat. Every player with this technology will be allowed to re-roll his failed combat dice in the first round of a space combat. You may immediately think that if you combine the Tachyon Scanner with the Quantum Scanner you get the most lethal combination in the game. Rest assured that will not happen, the same player will never have access to both technologies. The Tachyon Scanner will be available to a race which is not focused on space combat. But let's not rush into these details just yet.

In the base game of Exodus, the space combat is a pretty straightforward deal. You roll the dice, assign your damage and move to the next round, when you do the same thing all over again. With Basic Tactics the situation changes a bit. A player with this technology knows how to organize his fleet so that his most heavily armored ship takes the beating first. So, before each space combat (not every round of combat), Basic Tactics allows the player to assign one ship to stand in front of the rest of his fleet and take damage until it is destroyed. Only after this one ship is destroyed his opponents are allowed to distribute hits to the rest of the ships. 

In the same repertoire as Basic Tactics we are introducing Advanced Tactics. With this technology, a player is allowed to sacrifice one Dark Raider and deal damage to one enemy ship. The amount of damage is equal to the total strength of that Dark Raider's shields. If this does not look powerful enough, let me disclose one more detail. The player with access to this technology will also have a large fleet of Raiders, coming with the expansion (I won't say right now how many, but I can assure you that there will be enough to make this technology count). Imagine those inexpensive ships scattered all over the map and ready to deal up to three damage to any ship bold enough to attack.

There is, of course, another more advanced technology called Fringe Tactics. This one works in a very simple way. Every round of every space combat, the player who has researched Fringe Tactics will decide how the damage is distributed against his own ships. Overpowered? Maybe, but it will be equally expensive. And only available to one player. 

Centaurian Resistance Card

The last technology I am going to talk about today is Quantum Reflection. This one does not play an active role in space combat, but it brings something extra after winning the fight with a Centaurian Resistance ship. With Quantum Reflection you get the Victory Points depicted on the associated card (the one you get to keep after winning a battle against the Centaurians) and the specific benefit of that card. In short, "the benefit OR the VP" becomes "the benefit AND the VP". Now we are scratching a different part of the tech tree, specifically the technologies that allow players to score Victory Points, directly or indirectly, in ways which were not possible in the base game. I will develop on this topic in my next post.

Before I finish, I just want to say that Exodus has broken into top 1100 on BoardGameGeek! That was only possible with your help and I want to express my thanks for this. With the upcoming expansion, I now dare to hope that Exodus will climb about 300 places higher by next winter.

Exodus: Proxima Centauri in top 1100 on BGG

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An expansion for Exodus - I. Technologies

It's time to reveal more details about the upcoming big expansion for Exodus: Proxima Centauri. We will do this over several articles, tackling the aspects of the enhanced game play one by one. Today I will talk about some of the new technologies.

WMD and protection

Many people wondered how come there was no response to the very damaging and amazingly fun Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). Well... those technologies were prepared for a long time but we did not find place for them in the base game. However, they are coming strong in the expansion.

The Space Defense System allows players to build space structures with the same name. The SDS allows players to defend the planet in the same hex against incoming WMD. For each WMD targeting that planet, the owner of the SDS will roll a die and on a result of 4-6 the WMD is destroyed in flight, failing to do any damage. Most players will have access to this technology.

There's also an advanced version of this technology called the Advanced Space Defense System (ASDS). The structure build with this technology will provide protection to the planet in the hex containing the ASDS and in every hex around it. Any incoming WMD is destroyed automatically if it targets the hex with the ASDS. If the WMD targets any neighboring hex, the owner will again roll a die and on a result of 4-6 the WMD is destroyed. This is a much more powerful space protection system and therefore more expensive to research and build and it will only be available to one or two players. 

The Weapons of Mass Destruction will get an upgrade of their own, called Targeting Scanner. This technology will add 3 to the die roll of all WMD, making them a lot more accurate and increasing their range to a maximum of 8 (hexes distance).

And this is just the beginning... The Strategic Bombers technology will allow space ships to carry WMD and deploy them directly against planets in the same hex. The SDS will be of no use against this type of strategic warfare, but the ASDS will still provide protection.

High-Precision Scanners are mobile defense systems against WMD. With this technology, players will use their ships to target the WMD when they are launched or ready to hit their target. The space ships will use their cannons against WMD leaving from or targeting a planet is the same hex, but only a roll of 6 will allow a hit. it's going to be an expensive technology, but it will allow great flexibility in dealing with incoming strategic threats.

Space combat

This is another area of interest for may players since one can accumulate a lot of Victory Points through fighting enemy fleets. There are of course a few technologies enhancing the fighting capabilities of some of the players.

EMP Cannon is a completely new type of cannon. It is used in the first round of combat alone and it deals damage to all the ships involved in that battle. It deals no damage to ships with at least one Quark-Gluon Plasma Shield, it deals one damage to every ship with no QGP Shields but with at least one Multipolar Grid Shield and and it deals two damage to all ships without either a QGP or an MPG shield. Pretty powerful weapon, isn't it? On top of all that, it disables the standard cloaking devices of all ships. 

The Quantum Scanners are probably the most destructive devices a space ship can have. They allow hits on 4+ on the attack dice for all cannons, instead of the standard 5+ roll. I don't think I need to stress the amount of extra damage a ship with Antimatter Cannons can do with the added Quantum Scanners. But that's going to cost and it won't be withing easy reach of everyone. You just need to be on the right side of those deadly cannons!

Well... I hope I stirred up your curiosity. It won't be long before you'll get to see more of the new technologies in the expansion of Exodus.

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Latest confirmation and a big thank you to Korea

A board game is in a way like a soldier at war, it's skills and value are tested over and over again and only the strongest will survive. If soldiers risk their lives, board games have their reputation to put on the line. Every time someone talks about a board game it represents a small victory or a small failure. Like one day on a battlefield. But there are also big battle and losing too many of them may put one down while winning lots of them means winning the war.

Just yesterday Praetor has won its first major battle in its quest to conquer the world (of board gaming of course). For the past 30 days Praetor has been looking for the support of Korean gamers, looking to raise critical mass. And it did! 

Praetor is officially funded and we can confirm that there will be a Korean version of the game, published by NSKN Games and Board M.

In short, Praetor raised more than 11.5 million Korean Won which is a little more than 10,000 US dollars. Taking into account the size of the market, the competition and the target audience, our partners from Board M have all the reasons to be proud. We are proud of them and with them and we are hoping that Praetor will only be the first from a long list of titles from NSKN Games which will stir the interest of the awesome Korean gamers.

We are thanking all those involved and promise to make our best efforts to deliver as soon as possible.

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From Exodus to Praetor and back

We're in the final hours of the contest we have been running on BoardGameGeek, giving away copies of Exodus: Proxima Centauri and more. There's still time to jump in, there's nothing to lose, but in the best case scenario some games will come your way really soon... and here's the link

Exodus: Proxima Centauri BGG contest sponsored by NSKN Games

I know that many of you have been wondering what's the story with Praetor, when will it come out to the market, in what languages and so on.

The back of the box for the Japanese edition

The front of the box for the French edition

Well, we have good news! With the help of our partners we will publish the game in English, German, French, Japanese, Romanian, Polish and possibly Korean and Russian. 

With this massive production we are still hoping to meet the deadline we set for releasing Praetor in May in Europe and in August in North America, possibly at GenCon.

The one thing about Praetor we did not talk about before is the option for asymmetrical game play. Each player board will have one standard side and one expert side. Newcomers to the game are encouraged to play the standard boards, while expert players can simply turn their player board around and experience slightly different ways to optimize for the maximum amount of victory points.

Standard (A) side

Expert (B) side

Coming back to Exodus, today is also the last day when you can order the game directly from our online store. Besides the very few copies left for upcoming gaming conventions, we have sold out on all of our games. That's good news for us but also for you because the games are on the shelves of hobby stores around the world.

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Board games - status and plans for the future

We are in 2014 for less than a month and we're already crazy busy with our upcoming projects. But before we talk about them, let's see what has happened since our last post...

Exodus: Proxima Centauri

We though that after the release of the Revised Edition the sales of the first edition in the retail stores would cease. Fortunately this was not the case and the first edition is sold out almost everywhere. 

Now, moving on to the Revised Edition... the attention it got in Essen and afterwards made us sell out as early as November last year. We have only kept enough games to bring to the events we plan to attend in 2014. So, that's again good news.

Sales aside, Exodus has performed well also on BoardGameGeek. It went up the ranks slowly but steadily and entered top 1200 a week ago.

This makes Exodus our top performer and now we can hope that it will break top 1000 by the end of the summer.

Speaking of Exodus, we are working constantly on the expansion due in Spiel '14.

Praetor

Praetor is our next big project and we're getting really close to the start of production. We have good news for our non-English fans. Praetor will be published not only in English, but also in French, German, Japanese, Romanian, Korean and possibly 3 more languages.

The French box of Praetor

The rules are ready and the translations are almost final. We are waiting for the final numbers from our partners and we hope to release the game in the spring.

The Blog

We have reached an audience of over 10,000 viewers per year and we want to thank all of you who are giving us a piece of your precious time.

It's been 18 months since we're writing for the gaming community and there have been weeks with 3 or 4 posts, but also gaps filled with silence. Therefore, we have decided to do this in a more organized way. We want to let you know what you can expect. We plan to write once a week, unless some out-of-the-ordinary things are happening and we cannot hold back.

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