Excavation Earth is live (Alien gold diggers)
Update: Excavation Earth is live on Kickstarter, and the campaign will run for 22 days. You may back for just the base game and the Artifacts promo pack or also add the Second Wave expansion. The Collector pledge gets you the game, the expansion, the promos, plus a set of metal coins.
The solo mode will be one of the stretch goals, so details have not yet been revealed.
(Update April 9: Solo mode unlocked. You play against an alien corporation AI, the Zu, which consists of clones of the CEO. The AI has its own deck of cards and adjustable difficulty. On each turn, you draw a card that usually sends the clones to Excavate, Market, and Survey. You have to collect more credits than them to win the game).
During this campaign, Mighty Boards will release free 1-2 player PnP versions of their games: Petrichor, Vengeance, Posthuman Saga (and Excavation Earth for backers only).
Our preview post below was published on April 2.
Excavation Earth is a 1-4 player action selection and hand management game about alien traders who dig out artifacts from -an abandoned from humans- Earth to sell on the black market. It is planned to launch on Kickstarter on April 6. The solo mode has been developed by David Turczi and Nick Shaw.
Each player represents an alien race and starts with a hand of seven cards. On your turn, you can perform two out of eight available actions: 1) you may Travel: move your explorers on the map. 2) Excavate: discard a card from your hand with the colour matching that of the region your explorer is in. 3) Sample the artifact: place a security guard cube on the designated space on your board. 4) take a Market action: discard a card and add a cube on the market spot to manipulate the buyers. 5) Export: earn credits according to the state of the market. 6) Influence: discard a card to place a cube in the matching market trader area and another in the matching media room. 7) Smuggle: you may either buy artifacts from the black market or sell artifacts to gain credit. 8) Pass.
The next phase is media scoring: media rooms score according to which player has the most cubes in that space. In the preparation phase, after the third round of media scoring, players score according to the security guard cubes they have on their personal ship galleries. The player with the most credits, wins the game. Details about the solo mode have not been revealed yet.
An Expansion, It Belongs in a Museum, is comin' to KS August 3rd.
Here is the actual board in the background, it is probably close to final version. (They haven't posted any good pictures yet).
Is that the actual board in the pic? Ugh; it looks like an old board from Risk.