JAMES HOLDEN EXPANSE INSTALL
JAMES HOLDEN EXPANSE SERIES

The upgrades add a dash of personality to each side. It isn’t uncommon to achieve some of your most important goals when it isn’t even your turn. It endows every turn with an extra dose of uncertainty, and does wonders to keep everybody involved at all times. This entire system is an unexpected and pleasant surprise. In The Expanse, sitting still usually means you’re stagnant. This keeps everybody in motion, always hoping to shift some influence into a new center of power, especially once a region has been scored its maximum two times. There’s an art to determining where and when you should trigger a scoring round, especially since you can only select one of the solar system’s three regions to earn bonus points. Meanwhile, players already at the bottom lose nothing and might as well claim everything that comes their way, easing the stress of occupying the lowest rung.Ĭrucially, even the game’s scoring cards trickle onto the table this way. This is handled elegantly, with factions choosing to accept or decline a card based on their “initiative.” Whenever an event is claimed off-turn like this, your initiative plummets to the bottom of the heap, meaning you can say goodbye to the first pick of future events until everybody else has had a chance. Worse, failing to take a card for its event will let the other factions have a stab at it. Action points usually bestow a higher degree of control, letting you reposition fleets, blow stuff up, and nudge your influence into the right place, while events are a tad more powerful but spill randomly from the deck and don’t always align with your goals.

Right away, this presents a tricky choice that will be familiar to anyone who’s played Twilight Struggle. And second, it’s up to you whether to use a card for its action points or its event. The first twist is that a card’s price is paid with the same points you’re accumulating to win the game, making even the juiciest offerings a real sacrifice to nab. New options cost more, while older stuff gradually settles to the bottom where they cost nothing.

JAMES HOLDEN EXPANSE SERIES

If anything, it occupies the same pedigree as serious wargames like the COIN Series or Twilight Struggle, driving the action both on your turn and off it, without ever feeling a step out of place despite The Expanse’s lighter gameplay.Įach player’s turn opens with the purchase of one these cards. The real highlight here is the card system, which feels about ten times smarter than we’ve come to expect from a licensed title published by anyone other than Gale Force 9. They’re totally cool with more games using their card system. It’s wonderfully simple, yet allows plenty of room to whine to your friends that they shouldn’t dislodge your choke-hold on Jupiter. In particular, you’ll want to look out for those bases that provide your preferred resources, while jabbing at anyone who swings by to disrupt your monopoly.

JAMES HOLDEN EXPANSE INSTALL

Within those, everything is divided into multiple orbitals, the domain of spaceships, and further into smaller bases where you hope to install as much of your faction’s influence as possible. The solar system is divided into four “bands,” an abstract measurement that means it takes a lot longer to reach Saturn than to shuffle from Earth to Mars. Everybody is looking out for number one, alliances are forged and broken, and constant tension and arms-race sensibilities rule the day.įor the most part, the turn-by-turn process is fairly straightforward. Players are given one of four roles, leading Earth, Mars, the upstart Belters, or EvilCorp, each with their own centers of power, abilities, upgrades, and scoring opportunities. The thing is, The Expanse - the cardboard version - totally nails it. It’s been called “Game of Thrones in space,” though probably only by marketing computers that don’t understand how similes work. In short, there are factions with ambiguous goals, tenuous political alliances, and the occasional proverbial dagger is burrowed into the occasional literal backside. Now it’s Earth and Mars in an uncomfortable alliance against the massive Belter population, with some shady-as-Enceladus (the shadiest moon of Saturn) corporations thrown into the mix as obvious bad guys. All our current problems - scarce resources, man’s inhumanity to man, unsolved religious and ethnic and class quarrels - have grown right along with our expanding girth. Humanity has spread across the solar system, occupying Mars, the asteroid belt, and the moons of the outer planets. Not necessarily what I picture when I imagine an expanse, but okay.įor those who don’t know the first thing about The Expanse, let me clue you in.

James holden expanse