Quasar Search

(working title, aka "Space Game")

These are the draft rules of a co-op deckbuilder game, a la Arkham Horror LCG, with a focus on wacky cards and interactive choices. See the Latest Preview Cards!

Lore!
Game Introduction
Let's Play! Quick Start

Lore!

The year is 1999; well, it is for the Gorgons, anyways... for the Botulans, it's "Rot 738", and the Greebans are on year 12.XB.922. For us Earthians, we'd call it 2057.

A mysterious signal starts blasting from the center of the universe. Every species that was even remotely paying attention to radio waves hears it; some of the smarter creatures are even able to decode it. It holds instructions for powerful technology, centuries ahead of what most species have achieved so far: massive energy generation and storage, faster-than-light travel, dark matter computers, and also some really good bean dip recipes.

For a time, it seems like the universe is in a golden age, as it turns out most living things are happy in a post-scarcity society. Civilizations thrive and grow, and eventually begin to expand to new planets, and tiny interstellar empires are formed. Space is Big™, and it seems like there's plenty to go around for everybody.

Unfortunately, many cultures discover that though our universe is Big™, it's far from empty, and the indigenous phenomena are not happy about having new neighbors.

There's your run-of-the-mill troubles, like black holes and cosmic flares, that most scientists already know about; however, they really wished the signal had warned them about planet-eating planets, sharpshooter stars, gravity wastelands, and antimatter comets. There are rumors that somebody recently awakened an ancient drone army that's hunting down all life it can find, and twice now, an entire spacefaring civilization has just vanished - instantly and silently.

Some species withdraw back into the safety of their home planet. Other species have no homeworld left, and are trying to rebuild across scattered colonies. Political factions splinter and proliferate as each government evaluates whether this gifted technology is a blessing or a burden. The golden age turned out to be just a brief flash.

In every species, there are some who quest for answers; who see the problems of today and seek out solutions; who are willing to take personal risks to support others. These people spread the message of unity, a cross-species organization that will share knowledge and resources to protect this new world. It takes several years to form, but today marks the Founding Day of the We Are Team, or WAT! (it took months to find a name that was pronounceable by even a majority of species). It may look like a mishmash of various aliens, with completely different culture and communication methods, trying to work together with custom technology that they didn't invent and is barely compatible with others', but they're trying.

You are a commander of an 'elite' crew, assigned to the maiden voyage of the Mini-planet Goodstew (which is obviously a Pagnalion ship). Your trip will be dangerous, and honestly, isn't likely to succeed, but it's better than another semester of interspecies diplomacy training modules. Captain Starchcarb calls you up to the Ready Room, where you'll create a plan to find answers to the one question that every WAT! member species has:

Who actually sent the signal, and why can't we find them?

Game Introduction

(Terms that mean something special to the rules are bolded, so you'll know you can look up that term for more information. Notable story and flavor terms are ~~highlighted in green someday~~, and have no effect on the rules, but are fun to learn about, if you're into that.)

Space Game is a multiplayer co-operative deckbuilder game, focused on working together to complete Challenges and complete a Mission successfully. Each player is a Commander of one of the many Factions working in the WAT!, and will build a deck of cards that represent the actions the player's crew can take to help the team succeed.

The game is played in rounds called Acts, with each Act consisting of multiple Challenges, much like tricks in a trick-taking game. Each player will play a card for each Challenge to try to meet its Target, which usually care about the value of your cards. All cards have a wild value that applies on any Challenge, but most cards will have stronger values for specific skills that a crew member might have, e.g., Piloting, Biology, and Diplomacy. Some Challenges will specify applicable skills, which lets players use the stronger value if their card has a matching skill.

Having the right skills will be key to succeeding at Challenges, but having the right skill at the right time is harder than it looks! As the Act continues and the Challenges stack up, each player's hand will get smaller and smaller, limiting their options. Fortunately, our aliens wouldn't have gotten this far without having a few clever tricks! Player cards also come with a variety of rules and abilities to prepare for the dangers ahead - if you can meet their requirements, of course! Can your crew show off and earn enough Glory to boost their power? Or maybe if you can start some Projects, they'll pay off right when you need them most! You could always Stockpile your resources, too - putting cards from your hand back in your deck, to draw them in a later Act where you know you'll need them!

This is especially important in Space Game, because you will see every card in your deck, every game! A typical game will have 30 Challenges, one for each card in a standard deck, which means most players must play every card in their deck during the Mission! Players will build their decks with this important rule in mind: you can put some great combos in your deck, but will you get them in the right order? Some important game abilities will allow you to swap cards between your hand and your deck, letting you setup for a perfect final Act will all your best stuff, but build wisely! Once a card is discarded, it's gone for the rest of the Mission!

If that wasn't enough, you've got your fellow crew to contend with! You may be cooperating, but that doesn't always translate to "friendly." Some player cards have powerful abilities, but lackluster values, which may cause the team to fail the current Challenge with the promise of more support later. Can your crew find a rhythm that works for the good of the many, or will you be the last one standing on a crippled starship?

To play Space Game, each player brings a Faction Card and a personal deck of cards, and together they choose a Mission to complete. Each Mission is broken up into multiple Acts, and the players will usually complete 3 Acts per Mission. An Act is a set of cards that describe the players' overall goal ("Capture an Asteroid!", "Smuggle a Diplomat!", "Outrun a Turtle Cruiser!") and how to achieve it, and also builds a deck of Challenges, which scenes the crew encounter during the Act ("Shields Up!", "Full Impulse!", "Turn the Tractor Beam into a Lasso!"). Each Act has its own rules for what constitutes success, but they frequently require players to succeed at Challenges.

The Starter Kit follows the crew of the Mini-planet Goodstew as they set off on the inaugural Mission of WAT!. It contains the Mission cards, as well as 4 player decks to choose from. You can download the Starter Kit here.

1. Mission Setup

Find the Mission Card for this Mission. It looks like this: panda

The Mission Card front tells you the name of the Mission, along with any special rules that apply only to this Mission.

You can also flip over the card at any time to read a short lore prologue.

Next, gather all the Act Cards that belong to this Mission. For our Quick Start game, there are just 3:

panda panda panda

Each Act Card front has a title, a Goal to accomplish, a Domain symbol, a Sequence Number, and some suggested skill icons. Some Act Cards also have special rules that apply during that Act. Unlike the Mission Card, don't look at the backs yet; you'll flip the Act Card over once the Act is complete, and read the appropriate section for success or failure.

You'll always start a Mission with the Act Card that has Sequence Number 1; but you are allowed to look at the front of all Act Cards before and during a Mission. By looking at the suggested skills each Act Card has, you'll be better able to plan your game! For example, maybe the first Act suggests it will have Biology Challenges, and the final Act suggests Piloting Challenges; in this case, if you have the ability to manipulate your deck, you'll want to try and find Biology cards to play now, and put your Piloting cards from your hand back into your deck to play later.

Each Act card also has an associated Domain, which roughly describes the sort of environment(s) the Act takes place in. The Domain of our first Quick Start Act is "Urban", which means we'll be off-ship in a (mostly) civilized setting with (mostly) sentient species. Some player cards will have different abilities in different Domains, so remember what cards you brought and try to play them when they're at their strongest!

2. Player Setup

In a regular game, each player would already have brought a player deck and Faction Card and have them in front of them, but for this Quick Start, each player should look through the starter setups and choose a set that appeals to them. You can familiarize yourself with your cards, or simply go in blind for this playthrough, I'm sure it will all workout fine.

If your Faction Card has special instructions marked for the "Player Setup" phase, you do them now.

Next, all players shuffle their player deck and draw 10 cards into their hand.

From now on, the order of the cards in your deck is important, and you may not modify your deck order unless instructed by a game effect. It's okay to move cards around (or even shuffle the deck) if a card tells you to, but you can't shuffle your deck for fun.

3. Act Setup

This Mission starts with the Act Card with Sequence Number 1, so put that one out prominently on your table. Our Act Card has no special instructions, so we're going to do the default setup. Find all the Challenge Cards associated with this Act by ~~mumble mumble an icon manybe?~~ and stack them in a deck. Shuffle that deck, and keep only the top 10 cards. This Act has 12 cards total, so just set the bottom 2 aside. Put this Challenge Deck faceup next to the Act Card.

Players also need to select their Rank for this Act. Rank is a meta-status that determines the "pecking order" of the crew members taking part in this Act. On its own, all it does it determine turn order when that is needed (which is rarely), but it is commonly referenced by both player cards and Challenge Cards. For example, some player cards become more powerful when used with a higher-ranking crew member, and some Challenge Cards will have effects that apply to the highest- or lowest-ranking crew members (don't call them redshirts!)

Each Faction Card comes with 3 Rank Cards, and you must use a different card in each Act. Each Faction has its own set of Rank Cards with varying Rank Values, with some valuing it highly, and others being more "communal" than "hierarchical". Rank Values range from 1-star (lowest) to 5-star (highest). Players are free to choose any of their available Ranks in each Act; your team could be all 1-star cadets, or perhaps you send in all the senior staff at 4- and 5-stars. The highest-ranking crew member, regardless of their actual Rank value, is designated the Team Leader, which may be referenced by other cards. If two crew members have the same Rank value when determining Team Leader, or when determining Rank Order, ties are broken by the Rankbreaker on their Faction Board, with the higher Rankbreaker having the higher Rank. That's a lotta rules, you probably don't need to know all that right now.

Your Faction and deckbuilding will inform whether or not you care about Rank; some decks will try to be Team Leader in every Act, while other decks almost ignore it completely. Most decks will interact with it at least a little in some way.

4. Start the Act

If your Faction Card has special instructions marked for the "Act Start" phase, you do them now.

Next, look at the top card of the Challenge Deck! ...yes, it's been visible this whole time, but now we're actually going to read it.

Since the order of the Challenge Deck is random, I don't know what card is on top of your deck, but let's use this one as an example:

panda

Each Challenge Card has a title, a Target box, a "Success" box, and a "Failure" box. The Target box explains what the crew needs to do in order to succeed at this Challenge. This card is an All-Out Challenge, which means to succeed, the sum of all the values of cards confronting the Challenge need to be a certain number or higher. The Target box shows the different target values depending on how many players are in the game; for a hypothetical 4-player game, this Challenge Card has a target value of "18+", which means the sum of all confronting cards must be 20 or higher to succeed.

We can also look at the "Success" and "Failure" boxes to get an idea of what the stakes are. Once the Challenge is resolved, you will always read exactly 1 box, depending on whether the Challenge succeeded or failed. For this Challenge Card, if we fail, the crew will take 1 Ship Damage, but if we succeed, we get to read the back of the Challenge Card. That also means we don't really know what will happen if we succeed, but in general, you can trust that the success outcome will be better than the failure outcome.

This card also has some skill icons on it (most Challenge Cards will). That indicates that those skills are particularly useful in this Challenge, so cards you confront this Challenge with can use either their "wild value" that all player cards have, or their alternative "skill value" if your player card has a skill value matching one of the skills on the Challenge Card! "Skill values" are frequently much higher than "wild values", and some player cards may have special rules that also depend on what icons are on the Challenge Card. Matching skill icons is a great way to ensure you succeed at Challenges!

So now, let's try to succeed! Pick up this Challenge Card and put it down on the table, in what we'll call the Challenge Zone.

5. Our First Challenge

We are now officially in our first Challenge! In the full rules, there are a bunch of little phases and steps that are silently happening in the background (like "Challenge Start" and "Before Confronting"); you won't think about them most of the time, but they help you make sure you apply any special card effects in the right order. We have no special card effects that apply right now, so we get to jump right to the Confrontation Phase!

This is the step where you get to choose what card to add to the current confrontation (that's just a fancy word for "all the cards that are being applied to this Challenge"). Most of the time, each player will do what you're doing now: choose 1 card from your hand and put it in the Confrontation Zone next to the Challenge Deck.

player-card

So... what card do we play? Well, that's the game, of course! But there are some general guidelines to consider:

For this Challenge, bigger is better! Play a card with a high value, which will usually be because you've got a card with a "skill value" that matches a skill on the Challenge Card (note: in game language, this is called demanding a skill, like: "this Challenge demands Biology, so I'll play a card that has a Biology skill value.")
But... wait, will we succeed by too much? If everybody plays a strong card, we might use our best cards too early, and have nothing for later Challenges! Remember, you are always free to talk with the other players about what your options are, and you can show each other any cards in your hand that you want! Make a plan as a team to get through not just this Challenge, not just this Act, but the whole Mission!
So what do I play if the rest of the group can succeed at the Challenge without me? In that case, read your cards to find other benefits: Many cards have low values, but provide some other sort of benefit when used to confront! Some keywords you can look for in the Starter Kit are Stockpile, which lets you put a card from your hand back under your deck to use in a later Act, or Start a Project, which lets you put a special type of player card, a Project, from your hand into your Personal Zone! Projects can give you a variety of benefits while in your Personal Zone, and you can still use them to confront later in the Act.

There's another fact to consider: (most) players will play their entire hand, and end the Act with no cards left! Succeeding at Challenges is easy when you've got 10 cards to choose from, but what about when you're down to your last 2 leftovers? Sometimes, saving strong cards for the end of the Act is necessary, even if it means failing early Challenges! You've also got other options, like cards with Sensors, which lets you see upcoming Challenge Cards, so you'll know what skills to hang on to for that last Challenge!

Once all players confronted a card, we move on to the Resolution Phase.

6. Resolving Challenges

Gather all the cards in the Confrontation Zone together. For this Quick Start Game, there will be one card for each player, but that may not always be the case: some game effects will allow players to confront with more or fewer cards than other players, and this is okay! The final confrontation is always made up of all the cards that got put in the Confrontation Zone.

The Starter Kit contains some cards that have effects "Before Resolving"; if any of those cards are active, their abilities happens now. Player cards that are faceup on the table are considered active (except for cards in discard piles), so active cards include both cards in your Personal Zone as well as the Confrontation Zone.

Now, go ahead and compare your confrontation to your Challenge's Target! For the example card I used above, this would mean adding up all the card values and comparing it to 18; you might have a different Target type entirely! For help with reading the Target symbols, you can check out the almanac, or use the cheat sheet included in the Starter Kit.

Once you know whether you've succeeded or failed, read the appropriate box on the Challenge Card. Sometimes the result is a simple effect, and you can check the almanac to find the rules for what it means. Other times, the box will ask you to flip over the Challenge Card and read the back (this could happen on both successes and failures). This is usually reserved for more complex results, like successes that are especially helpful to the Goal, or failures that cause significant effects. In either case, read the back of the card and perform any actions it lists.

The last step for our starter game is the "Cleanup Phase", where we literally clean up the table. For now, that means each player card in the confrontation should be put faceup in its owner's discard pile ("owner" here meaning "the player that brought the card in their deck". If you got confused because you're borrowing cards from a friend, then good for you for having great friends!) Other player cards with complicated effects may care about this phase, too, and it will be specified on that card. You also take the Challenge Card you just completed and put it "away", or "outside the game", or "in exile", or whatever your favorite game term is for "you will not use this card anymore this game." In doing so, you will reveal the next card of the Challenge Deck, which will be the current card on top.

1 down, 9 to go! We're back in the Challenge Start phase from step 5 with our next Challenge Card: that's usually the card on top of the Challenge Deck, but if you've played a card with Sensors, then you follow the rules for Sensors and use the card in the bottom of the Sensors Queue. Either way, you can now play through the rest of the Act until you've completed every card in the Challenge Deck! When you inevitably find keywords you don't know on your cards, use the almanac or Starter Kit cheat sheet to learn more; or heck, you could even ignore them for now if you're feeling overwhelmed, we're really just here to learn the basics.

7. Resolving Acts

Resolving Acts works pretty much exactly like resolving Challenges, except you'll always just flip over the Act Card and read the back, where you'll find instructions for both success and failure. So first, determine if you succeeded or failed!

Acts will have a wider variety of Goals than Challenges have Targets, so you'll likely need to just read the Goal on the front of the Act Card and determine whether or not your team succeeded. Sometimes, you'll have needed to get a certain number of successes during the Act, or maybe succeed at specific Challenges; other times, it's enough that you simply survived to the end of the Act; and in rare cases, you won't know if you succeeded or failed until you read the back of the Act Card at the end!

In any case, your result on the back of the Act Card will tell you which Sequence Number to play next; for our Quick Start game, both success and failure direct you to Sequence Number 2, but this may not always be true! Missions can have branching storylines, where succeeding or failing at Acts can lead to wildly different outcomes of the Mission. Maybe now, instead of trying to escort the Ruuugian diplomat to the Nunck Conflict Zone, your mission goal has become to simply flee from the pirate dreadnought that kidnapped them!

Either way, it's time for a small bit of R&R while you've got the chance: it's the Ship Phase!

8. The Ship Phase

Your first Act likely didn't go... perfectly. You've probably suffered some Crew Damage and/or Ship Damage, and used some cards you wish you'd drawn in the final Act. That's all okay! The Ship Phase gives you a chance to recover and prepare before the next Act.

~~The rules for the Ship Phase will go here. They are not here right now. Mostly because they don't exist. But they will. Someday.~~

Placeholder Thoughts: * You get a collective number of Ship Actions, usually determined by a number on the Faction Cards. * Damage reduces the number of Ship Actions you can take. * Crew damage is the easy-come, easy-go style penalty; If you spend an action to heal a crewmate, you immediately get their 'lost' action back; the limiting factor here is that there are only so many beds in medbay by default, so if you hold too much crew damage, you will lose out on real actions. * Ship damage is cribbed from Sleeping Gods, it reduces the number of times you can use a certain room, determined by die roll. Repairing doesn't give an immediate action back. Should be avoided! * Once everybody is healthy again, use your remaining actions to curate your deck for future Acts, 'gain XP', or purchase in-game resources like Glory or Energy that your cards might use. * If your playgroup is friendly, all actions can be taken by anyone in any order; Yaay! If your playgroup is tense, actions are taken in Rank order, where the player whose turn it is gets final say over how the action is spent, but can benefit any player (i.e., maybe Andy wants to use the last action to heal Chris's crew, but Ben wants to use it to repair the ship; they have been taking actions in Rank order, and now it's Andy's turn, so Andy chooses to use the action to heal Chris's crew, even though it's not Chris's turn to decide the action.) If your playgroup is hostile, get better friends!

Once all the Ship Actions have been used, find the Act Card with the next specified Sequence Number and perform the Act Setup step again (just that step, don't do Player Setup again! Keep your deck and discard pile as they are.) This will include setting up the next Challenge Deck for the Act, and each player choosing their Rank for this Act.

Complete Act 2 much like you did Act 1, then resolve the Act and perform the Ship Phase again. There are no rules changes between the first and second times you do Ship Phase.

If you continue like this, you should reach the end of Act 3, and be ready to resolve the Mission!

9. Mission Resolution

After you complete the final Act of a Mission, instead of being directed to a Sequence Number, you'll be told to read an Ending Letter. The Endings are usually not written on any of the cards, but will be in supplemental text that comes with the Mission pack. The Endings for this Quick Start mission are found in the Starter Kit. Find your ending, and learn the fate of your crew!

10. "Warp It Up!"

You've completed your first game of Space Game! I hope you found it enjoyable. If you'd like to play more, you can try building your own decks and trying the Quick Start Mission again, or you could keep your current decks and bring them to a new Mission, or go nuts and make new decks for a new Mission!

There are no rules for Legacy Play yet (your decks currently can't improve, and your Factions can't take persistent damage), but the intent is that you will be able to play with your deck for as long as you're having fun, and players can bring in brand new decks at any time without drastically warping the difficulty. For a more-challenging experience, Missions can be strung together into Campaigns, which will demand use of all available skills and card combos to get to the end safely. There's still days of playtesting before that comes, though, but keep an eye out!