The best captain in Selsia
Selsia is a 1-4 player space adventure game in which you play as a spaceship captain striving to achieve fame in the Selsian Solar System. The Kickstarter campaign will launch on November 2.
The game is played on a board featuring planets on which you can stop to take the specific actions they may offer. You can take jobs that, if fulfilled, will bring you fame. All the while, you must manage your three resources: food, scraps, and credits. To start the game, you must first pick a spaceship board and its corresponding miniature, all ships being different and unique. You also choose a secret objective.
Each round, you go through three phases: the Action phase and two refill phases, for both your Actions tracker and the public market. During the Action phase, you can spend Action points (you start with ten of these) to move around the board, triggering an attack (if such is your wish) when you land on an enemy ship, and you must take one of the two main actions: the planet action where you currently stand or fulfilling a job. With some planet actions, you can purchase upgrades from the public market to improve and customize your ship. Outer rim planets offer you a job to fulfill, but you can only take one job at a time. Besides the main action, you may also perform free actions (recruiting a crew member with food, gaining energy by spending scrap and credits, or spending energy to increase a die roll result by one). Turns go on this way until all players decide to pass. Then, in the Actions refill phase, you regain your 10 Action points; furthermore, any Action points that you didn’t spend during that round earn you one scrap. In the last refill phase, you refill the available upgrades of the public market.
Upgrades are crucial. Some allow you to take on better jobs, and grant you the ability to hold more valuable cargo. Some add bonuses to your dice rolls, others allow you to roll better dice (d10 or d12 instead of d6). Dice are used to fulfill specific jobs, but also to resolve combats. In combat, the attacker rolls the red die, the defender the blue one, whoever rolls highest wins, with ties being won by the attacker. Both players can spend crew members to re-roll their dice. The winner gets a reward in form of a combat card. If the winner is the attacker, they destroy an upgrade of the defenders’ ship –but this upgrade may be repaired on a future turn by spending energy.
To win the game, you must be the first to reach a given Fame points threshold (which depends on how long you want the game to be). You gain Fame by fulfilling jobs, but also by earning influence with planets. When you fulfill a job on a planet, you can put there one of your three influence cubes, and earn the specified amount of fame. However, these influence cubes can be ousted by other players when they replace it with their own influence markers; in such a case, you lose the Fame that the influence cube brought you.
The solo mode is still under construction. However, according to the list of components in the rulebook, it seems that it introduces a card-driven Automa to compete against.
They have just announced that the Kickstarter is postponed to February 1, 2022.
Seems okay.