/pic6034093.png)
:strip_icc()/pic5978543.jpg)
You might already know this, but Stellaris is a video game that debuted in 2016 from Paradox Interactive, which describes the game as follows:
Quote:
Explore a galaxy full of wonders in this sci-fi grand strategy game. Interact with diverse alien races, discover strange new worlds with unexpected events and expand the reach of your empire. Each new adventure holds almost limitless possibilities.
This description shortsells the vastness of the game, which has had numerous expansion packs to introduce new species, weapons, megastructures, empires, extinct civilizations, and much more. At the start of the game, set after the discovery of faster-than-light speed travel, you can choose a pre-made empire or craft one of your own, complete with ethics and civics that represent your ideology and give you advantages and disadvantages.As for the adaptation of this game, Academy Games' Uwe Eickert tells me, "Paradox approached us in 2018 and asked if we would be interested in developing the board game based on their best-selling product. They liked the quality, depth and thought that we put into our games and felt that we could do a great job with Stellaris."
The result is Stellaris: Infinite Legacy, with that subtitle being shorthand for important aspects of the design. The board game mimics the video game in how you start, with you designing your own species and empire from dozens of trait, ethics, and government cards. You can use this empire in a single game session that last 90-150 minutes, or you can keep this empire and continue to play with it over multiple sessions, gaining new technology, discovering new game mechanisms, and building your own collective history. "Players can jump in and out as they wish", says Eickert, "with new players joining in with new empires when they wish and old players abandoning their empires to begin new ones — but the old empires remain in the game, affecting the storyline as it radiates forward."
:strip_icc()/pic6036932.png)
And this is where we get to the "Infinite Legacy" part of the design, with Academy noting that this is the first such game in a series of titles. You can play the game as much as you like, with both you and the game itself introducing new elements from one play to the next in a non-destructible manner that allows you to rewind time and re-start from an "out of the box" state should you wish to do so. If you keep playing, though, the game "leads players through a storyline in which the players' choices impact how the direction of the story progresses. This results in thousands of combined story paths and a unique narrative in each game." (Oath: Chronicles of Empire and Exile from Cole Wehrle and Leder Games promises something similar, along with players being able to enter and leave the overall game between sessions.)
Eickert gives this brief example of the system in a BGG comment: "For example, if you destroy a planet, you could be marked with a key that will make future contacts with other civilizations very difficult, since the word of your actions may have leaked out. But then you may take a future action that pins the blame on another civilization, again altering the story line and emanating game play. So each decision does have a legacy effect, but without destroying game components."
Stellaris: Infinite Legacy is for 2-4 players, with expansions allowing for play with up to six, and Academy Games is launching a Kickstarter campaign for the game line on March 11, 2021.
/pic6029823.png)
In this 2-4 player game, you take turns choosing a monster segment from your reserve and using it to increase the length of your creature on the Loch game board. Each new segment must be placed next to your monster's head or tail — with the head or tail piece then moving to the far side of the newly-placed piece — and you can cross the path of other monsters on the board only if you can go above them.
Once all players are blocked or everyone has placed all of their segments (with the size of the game board changing depending on the number of players), whoever has the fewest segments remaining in their reserve wins. In case of a tie, the tied player whose monster head has the highest elevation wins.
:strip_icc()/pic6008816.jpg)
• In May 2021, Blue Orange Games will release Zoom in Barcelona, a 2019 design from designers Núria Casellas, Eloi Pujadas, and Joaquim Vilalta and publisher Cucafera Games in which 2-6 players hustle around Barcelona to take pictures of landmarks and other locations. (For more details, check out my written and video overview from October 2019.)
• May 2021 will also see the release of Zoom in Kobe, an adaptation of the game system to a different city courtesy of Japanese publisher Group SNE, with new art by Sai Beppu. Very smart idea by the original design team to devise a system that can be modified by publishers around the world!
/pic4881208.jpg)
/pic6035913.png)
• U.S. publisher Pandasaurus Games has announced that in September 2021 it will release English-language versions of two 2020 titles from French publisher Catch Up Games: the combo-driven card game Wild Space from Joachim Thôme in which you need to acquire crew to land your spaceships on different planets (game overview video here), and the combo-driven co-operative game The LOOP from Maxime Rambourg and Théo Rivière (preview post here).
/pic6026887.png)
:strip_icc()/pic6032775.jpg)
/pic4493055.jpg)
:strip_icc()/pic6027210.jpg)
:strip_icc()/pic6026154.jpg)
:strip_icc()/pic6023756.jpg)
