A fast but deeply strategic board game for 2-4 players.Star Colonies is a 4X (Explore, Expand, Exploit, Exterminate) space game with “Deck-building” and “area-control” mechanics enjoyed by players who enjoy games like Master of Orion, Twilight Imperium, or Eclipse but condensed into a shorter playing time. There is no player elimination, shuffling cards, or down-time. Instead players may "react" from their "hand".
You play as a pioneer at the advent of FTL space travel. The dire situation on Earth encourages you to explore star systems for habitable worlds and fight to control the limited habitable worlds as they are revealed.
Each player starts with the same basic deck of Scoutships and Basic Transports.
Your Scouts explore star systems for habitable worlds while your Transports supply credits to build a fleet of spacecraft to protect your systems or capture them from other players. You may buy Outpost ships to build Outposts and later upgrade these to Colonies when you discover or claim a Colony-suitable world.
Other players will be buying warships from any of the three military factions and may send them to seize your systems and any Outposts there. You may use your ships to defend systems you have claimed, you may use them to lay claim to other systems in order to control the most victory stars, the future of the colonists on these new worlds will be in the hands of the most daring commander.
Contents:- STARTING DECKS: 36 cards with 30x Transports and 6x Scouts. (Players take a deck of 8 Transports and 2 Scouts each, 4P games use a starting deck of 1 Scout and 7 Transports)
- TRANSPORT deck: 7 cards (4 Heavy transports, 3 Advanced transports), to upgrade your Trade fleet.
- OUTPOST deck: 9 cards (5 Outpost ships, 3 Colony ships, 1 Colony group) for Victory stars
- FLEET deck: 27 warship cards (9 Republic, 9 Confederation, 9 Alliance )
- OBJECTIVE CARDS: 6 Open objectives and 12 Secret objective cards (total 98 Poker-sized cards)
- EXPLORE deck: 16 jumbo STAR-SYSTEM cards (8 habitable and 8 uninhabitable systems)
- 2x jumbo Reference cards with turn sequence and combat sequence on the back. (total 18 Jumbo-sized cards)
- 4x A5 home system play mats
- 1x 4-fold central play mat, + A6 quick start booklet (full rulebook online) + Game setup sheet
Star Colonies can be played with 2, 3 or 4 Players. 2 player duels can be quite aggressive so for starting players it is can be actually more interesting to start with 3 or 4 players.
You can also play solo mode and its great fun to play in teams of 2 vs 2 or even 3 vs 3. 