Economy in Motion

Way back before I succumbed to the Australian 'flu I had a play-through of Kepler 3042, which - as there is talk of playing it tomorrow night - I thought I'd summarize briefly here.

main board - mostly empty

Kepler has been christened a 3X game - explore, expand, exploit, but no extermination. Instead it's a race of sorts - there are a finite amount of habitable planets in the galaxy, and you want to beat your opponents to the punch.

Your engine is an economy of three different resources: energy, matter, and anti-matter. On a given turn you choose an action to take and - usually - it means paying some of these resources. Having used some up, you'll now need to generate more; which is where the planets come in, as they produce for you. As with Scythe, you can't take the same action you took on a previous turn, and - also like Scythe - there's a potential secondary action to take as well.

individual boards - mostly busy

However! Though the secondary actions are cheaper than the main actions, there's a catch. Whereas matter, anti-matter and energy spent on a main action can be regenerated, any cubes spent on the second actions are gone forever; they fall into your Clausius Pit, never to be seen again. So while these actions are very tempting, they reduce the effectiveness of your overall economy: no matter how many planets you colonize and terraform, you'll only ever have a maximum of seven energy, seven matter, and three anti-matter cubes on rotation. The more secondary actions you take, the smaller this pool becomes and if you play too fast and loose, your productive early moves will be followed by a long fallow period.

good old FO-B50813

There are nine main actions and they revolve around constructing ships, improving the movement capacity, terraforming planets, producing resources from terraformed planets, improving your technologies or pushing yourself up the scientific and civil modernity tracks on the main board.

My tech

In each round there's an event too, but these are never punitive (albeit some players may not benefit, though you have the duration of the round to try and engineer yourself into position) and each player has an end-game goal to pursue. It felt to me like realizing these goals was more important than triggering the Baron bonus in Railways of the World - they kind of shape your plans for the whole game as they gave Dirk and I a direction to go in.

From my play-through it seems pretty dry, and the theme more stoic than dynamic: no luck-pushing, no explosions, no direct interaction beyond the - admittedly, potentially annoying - chance of someone speeding past you to colonize a planet you had your eye on. It's an engine builder where you're in a race, but there are no skid marks in space.

I would like to try it again with real opponents (and without a looming flu bug). The resource management and secondary-action at the centre of it is smart. Maybe with more of us the theme will come through as well.