Core Space chat

I'll need to get better at painting!

Latest update is looking pretty good. My paint jobs are going to be so trash, but I'll still probably give it a shot.

www.kickstarter.com/projects/battlesyste...t-born/posts/3154883

Talk of mech suits for traders, making rules to prepare for them... that could rule.

Thanks for sharing, I tend to check out on Kickstarters until they arrive so I don't have too much anticipation waiting.

Random thoughts:

Man, I love some of the artwork here. The ganger Nerida looks great for instance.

It's interesting seeing the little thin rectangular tokens, those were not in the original game but came in the Dangerous Days content. I like the further variety in potential equipment types they add, although they are a tiny bit fiddly.

Whoa, a dog? They're introducing trained creatures. Neat.

I see Gangers and Corps on those token sheets, I guess that means the Kickstarter comes with those two NPC types as well. That's huge. There will be a shit ton of content here. All of that stuff is modular and not used every mission so the variety should be wild.

What the hell are those brown sandworm things and the other two brown guys with rifles. In Core Space, the Purge minis are tan, heroes gray, civillians/gangers/corps blue, and it looks like First Born are green. What is this new character type?

Flying minis on clear bases are neat. Haven't seen that yet in this game.

Backpacks? Awesome. Wonder how those will work.

Those rigs with the weapon mount icon look really interesting, that will open up a new equipment type.

The mech suits look great. I can already tell mostly what they do simply by looking at the token - a quality of the game's simple rules and solid iconography - and they look like they will be very fun.

The ship board shows hints of being what I hoped they would. Money sink, added utility, more depth to the game, and a ton of character. Totally rad.

A continuation of Mission Mondays for First Born material is great to hear. The missions they post are great, not at all mailed in, and are totally worth exploring. They did end up including all of them in print in the Dangerous Days softcover. I like that approach as I'd love a hard copy and hope we see some additional expansion or annual for First Born.

Man, I'm not totally surprised but I'm still kind of shocked how this already great game can get even better. I think the key to all of this is the game's core simplicity. Adding all of these new equipment tokens does add overhead, but it's typically very small. If the cooperative/solo aspect provides nearly as fulfilling an experience as the semi-cooperative mode of the existing game, this may become one of my top 10 games of all time.

I believe the other character type is a mercenary that can be hired or act on its own.

I hope my spouse likes this, she loves gaslands and I think a coop minis game she could do some kitbashing and painting on could be a hit.

I fucking love this game. Checking out the last two small expansions (Black Star Rising and Wanted DOA), and I'm mid mission where some errant Purge are brawling with local security who are protecting a worker while I sneak around in the background hacking a terminal.

Purge take out one security guard before being torn apart by the second. I hack the terminal and then discover this worker is the whistleblower I was searching for, now I'm escorting him out of the station. Couldn't pull this off before the lone security warden searched my captain and confiscated a medkit.

Now we're booking it at high speed as the situation is relatively stable and no big Purge have shown up yet. Will see how it goes.

Edit - I suppose I should mention that this is the start of a new campaign/crew because last time I played (roughly three months ago), I lost two crew members to the big spider Purge called Mother. She swallowed them and repurposed their biomatter. It was a tragic end to the crew of the Taurus.

My new crew are two aliens, including the big Chit dude with three natural melee dice. They man the Scarecrow and are hopeful to stretch beyond a skeleton crew.

The new firstborn giant kickstarter package should be coming next few months, I'm pretty psyched but I also have to make room.

How vital are the Rogue Purge and the Shift Change expansions that are now out of print?

Gary Sax wrote: I'll need to get better at painting!

A year later. Did you get better?

Slightly. I did more Gaslands cars.

My core space painting will still look like shit, though, I still haven't done humans and Gaslands is easy by comparison.

n815e wrote: How vital are the Rogue Purge and the Shift Change expansions that are now out of print?

Shift Change was basically replaced as a product by Black Star Rising, it adds the same two new additions (worker and scavenger NPCs). To drill down more deeply, the characters are different but this is negligible. The missions it comes with are different as well. Again, no big deal as most people will never get to all of the available missions if you buy some of the expansions.

Rogue Purge is more complicated. I think it's a very neat expansion but it's also one of the easiest to skip in the entire line (I'd only put Purge Reinforcements behind it). The only reason to get Rogue Purge really is if you want to use them as an entirely new type of crew. It's almost like playing an alternate secondary mode as it drastically changes things up. But it also feels more weird and outside the bounds of normal Core Space.

So overall, not a big deal at all. To back this up, I traded away my copy of Shift Change recently as I lucked into a weird situation and couldn't resist. Black Star Rising fills that void completely.

The more I've thought about this game over time the more I have settled on the fact that expansions are really necessary to get the game to its best state. I need to write about this more formally and you could possibly glean it from the subtext of my previous articles, but the game functions best as a wild sandbox where you toss in a couple of different variables each play (such as gangers or security or workers or whatever).

I go a little nuts and just use every single event card from every expansion shuffled into a big deck instead of the mission suggested subsets. Totally unpredictable as the events will spawn NPC types you weren't planning on encountering.

But yeah, I totally would recommend buying at least a couple of expansions for long term play, especially if playing mostly solo or coop. This isn't necessary to get your feet wet, but you just don't quite see what the game can do without some additional NPC or Purge types.

Also, as Mark can attest, the basic scavenge mission in the rulebook is not particularly exciting. The Perseus campaign missions begin to show the creativity at work from the design team. Every single expansion includes at least one additional scenario and I've found all of these pretty solid and neat.

There are quite a few (close to 20 I think) free official scenarios you can find online.

Thanks a lot for the thorough explanation.

How do you feel about the custom crew rules? I have a loads of models that would also be fun to put into the game, like a Futurama crew and Judge Dredd.

I've never used them. I bought three of the four crew expansion sets (need to pick up Poseidon at some point), and found that far more variety than I need really.

Personally, I'm not big into crossovers unless it's explicitly part of the setting like in Heroscape.

charlest wrote: The more I've thought about this game over time the more I have settled on the fact that expansions are really necessary to get the game to its best state. I need to write about this more formally and you could possibly glean it from the subtext of my previous articles, but the game functions best as a wild sandbox where you toss in a couple of different variables each play (such as gangers or security or workers or whatever).

Welcome to Arkham LCG territory, baby.

What's your usual player number? 2p iirc? Do you do solo runs?

Thanks for the long comment!

I think pinnacle Core Space is two player semi-coop. The uncertainty of cooperation and light competition really provides for a great experience.

However, I would say about 60-70% of my plays are solo.