Last night, we played from 64 to 71 on our Leaving Earth game. In 2 years my pair of rovers is going to reach Mars via the cycler (from Stations) and I am racing my partner to finish a scientific experiment on the moon where he already has a base… he is going to launch Voyager in 72 and unless my exploration of Mars and Phobos yields a bunch of VP his occupation of the moon and Voyager will win him the game.
This game burns my brain… in a good way but I am still a little tired 
Have yet to play stations, but learning about the mars / aldrin cycler was great.
I gather the planned return to the moon plans to use an elliptical orbit for a long term staging station.
Is Leaving Earth still findable? It’s a game I’ve been salivating over for years, but never pulled the trigger because my partner would hate it. Recently, though, I’ve been buying games just for myself to play solo, so this is back on the wishlist!
It’s difficult. It’s made by a small firm in America. The rights and production tooling are owned by the parents of the creator who has now left the company. It gets made in batches.
So after about 13 to 14 hours of Leaving Earth, I conceded the game when my partner’s Voyager probe ran through the Outer Planets missions like it was on fire… and he quickly gathered up points. I might still have snatched victory if we had kept playing (because I would have found life on Mars and been able to return a sample through the cycler) but I admit to needing back our dinner table… we ended the game when I figured out that there was not enough time for a return trip to Enceladus to get a sample back to Earth.
Definitely needs another game. I like it a lot with two semi cooperative players. we shared the development of technologies more or less evenly (we skipped the joint ventures from Stations though). But right now I need a break from calculating how to optimally use the space shuttle and how much fuel I need for what and how many Saturn rockets and… what will stay in Orbit and what is going down and why can’t Eagle land on Earth and…
As for finding it… i hunted for the expansions for a year. I have seen the base game crop up every once in a while at obscure places.
In the USA you can simply order it from lumenaris.com and wait a few months until their next manufacturing batch. (Some retailers also carry it, but not many.)
In Canada I’m told it’s not too painful to do the same thing.
For the rest of the world the postage rates are horrendous. For four expansion cycles I organised a bulk order to the UK simply so that we could share the customs collection fee. Lumenaris (who are mostly a crafting supplies company) never had regular international distribution; finding it at retail meant (and still means) finding a retailer who’d taken a chance on ordering it directly.
I am in the US, so that’s good, but what in the heck is Lumenaris? They sell games, puzzles, felt, wine coasters… after looking at their website for ten minutes, I’m slightly skeptical that Leaving Earth is actually a real product. Although, if it does exist, the game looks pretty dang fun…
Well, one of our four for Spirit Island has been having her internet connection bounce on and off essentially constantly all week - a tech was supposed to look at it today, she called today and they had never been scheduled. This is the sort of thing I dealt with with CenturyLink, her current ISP, all the time. I despise them and would highly recommend steering clear if you ever have a choice between CenturyLink and a competitor. Even Comcast, who are a terrible company but have given me over a decade of above-rating internet speeds, free rating upgrades, and nearly problem-free service. Something I certainly can’t say for CenturyLink, who I also used for many years because I’d heard Comcast was the devil and had (apparently wildly outdated) concerns about cable sharing bandwidth with neighbors etc., despite my litany of issues with them, both directly and with a local ISP that was great but ultimately resold service from CenturyLink (nee Qwest, nee USWest) and thus was just another layer between me and the terrible service.
Aaaanyway, she was not available, so we played Greater Than Games’ first classic instead. Yep, Sentinels of the Multiverse. I played Starlight, from the Cauldron fan set. Eddy played Pyre, from the same set. My girlfriend played La Comodora, the heroic version of La Capitan, our only official hero. We took on Mythos (a Cauldron villain), leader of the Forgotten Order in the vampire-infested Courts of Blood. It was a lengthy struggle, but ultimately successful.
Mythos is a bit weird. He starts off hidden, only his minions and such coming out to menace you, triggering off different icons on the backs of his villain deck cards. You can optionally play extra villain cards at the villain end of turn phase to get him to an icon you want, ideally the blue eye, which lets you then play another card to advance his Dangerous Investigation ongoing. But of course these cards still are minions or ongoings or horrible one-shots, etc. The less you risk that way, the more people the Investigation card itself hurts. He has various mad scientists, mystics and relics at his command to mess with you, though mostly not too threatening (the exception being Clockwork Revenants, which have 10 HP and, if the red icon is up on his deck, do their lost HP as additional damage when they attack). Once you’ve got the Investigation advanced by (H) tokens (which we managed fairly early), he flips and is now destructible and removes the Investigation card. But he now either protects his minions and himself, plays an extra villain card, or attacks every hero for (H) damage depending on deck (with the option of playing one card extra to shift him off the defensive or offensive stances if you want. the extra card play, obviously, is not worth playing an extra card to get rid of.) We turned out to have trouble getting damage going, so although he’s a low HP villain, it took ages to get past the damage reduction and really lay into him.
Starlight has six Ancient Constellation cards that fuel the vast majority of her deck while doing nothing other than being played next to a target themselves. She has a powerful (2) damage reduction ongoing that requires sacrificing a Constellation each turn to keep up (she can in theory run more than one if she can keep up), an equipment that gives heroes with constellations extra damage versus non-heroes with constellations, an equipment that has her deal damage to anything she puts a constellation on and heal herself each time as well, an equipment that converts her damage to hero targets into healing instead (and gives her an attack she doesn’t start with that also draws a card), two copies of an ongoing that automatically pulls constellations back into play every turn and is not Limited, equipment that lets her sacrifice constellations to cancel damage to heroes, nukes for ongoing/environment cards on a per-constellation-blown-up basis, searches, lots and lots of card draw… basically, if you can get her set up, she is a powerful tank, a healer (to the limited extent anyone is a healer in Sentinels, but more so than the core game), has multiple support effects, and can do some chip/area damage, though it’s definitely her weakest area. She seems really strong if you can get that setup going. Which was a problem for me to start with - I had a couple turns with no constellations, and then more with just the one. Still, I singlehandledly tanked about 50-60% of the damage all game and managed enough healing to keep everyone in the game throughout.
Pyre’s main gimmick is that he irradiates cards in people’s hands. Based on that, he can trigger damage (often area, sometimes including to himself or other heroes), additional power use/draws/plays, playing cards that would otherwise be discarded on an interrupt basis, and a variety of other tricks. The big downside? He has two cards called Rogue Fission Cascades that immediately play themselves if drawn and hit every hero with any irradiated cards for damage equal to all irradiated cards in hands. And his power on the base character card and one variant shuffles that back in every time they hit his trash. Again, takes some setup.
Still really digging the Cauldron. It’s a bit weird, probably not entirely balanced, but…the concepts are cool and it adds nice variety. And of course, they’re done making official content for it…well, in that setting… so. Fan stuff is nice to try out.
Yeah, they mostly do crafting supplies apparently. Front page, “Games”, “Leaving Earth”.
Last night, Netrunner on jinteki.net against @Lordof1 who’s learning it at the same time I am. A last-moment victory for me. Yeah, I could see this eating my life.
Oh boy, so that was a 13-14 hour long game which you didn’t even finish? The description on BGG says 1-3 hours, so would you say this is due to the expansions?
I recently played SpaceCorp which really whet my appetite for this kind of space exploration sim. I’ve been looking at High Frontier 4th Edition but I think that’s a big step in terms of complexity, so maybe I should be looking for a copy of Leaving Earth which seems a lot more manageable. Would you mind telling me about those obscure places that provided you with a copy (I’m also based in Germany)?
We was robbed. Quite literally. Bloody hackers.
Yes, I’m really enjoying this game.
Well, yes. Playing with both expansions with extremely little prior play experience and my partner prone to analysis paralysis even under normal circumstances… (and I absolutely joined him). Also we knew it would take more than one night to finish and so we were in no hurry and gave ourselves a lot of time to explore the game.
Especially stations adds so much “stuff” to explore and now the game is 30 instead of 20 years and combining Stations and Outer Planets just gives you so many missions on the table that there is so much to do… we made a point of not looking at all the hidden things before we started.
Gameplay itself is pretty quick what took us so long was the missions planning–I am sure NASA can relate.
For example, it took me the better part of half an hour yesterday to figure out a mission bringing an astronaut to the moon to perform a scientific experiment and return to Earth with the results because I was sure that using refuelable Daedalus rockets and using the scientific module that was already on my space station in Earth orbit would save costs (it did).
Then I needed another few minutes to get over my anger when my missions didn’t even get off the ground because a friggin’ Juno rocket misfired in stage 1… because initially I wanted to take my science module back from the moon and that made all the calculations slightly off and …
The day before, it took me possibly an hour to grok how the Earth-Mars Cycler would work with Aero-Breaking and get my drop-two-rovers-on-mars Mission on the way. Only to discover the next day of play that I really should have planed for a return-samples-trip because Mars is just too much of a treasure trove 
Also: why are all the astronauts named and the rovers are not?
Just before the end, we debated a return mission from Enceladus with Ion drives for at least an hour only to figure out that it couldn’t get back in time and that was when I conceded.
PS: the description on BGG is way off. It may be that someone playing solo of the base game who knows what they are doing can finish a solo game in 2-3 hours but as soon as you have more than one person playing or add any more content… the solo is a puzzle, the other game is a race…
PPS: here’s a playthrough from Heavy Cardboard from just 3 days ago with just the base game. It took him 3 hours for a solo. Now he has not played in a while apparently but he is used to heavy games and he has a stream full of people to help him (although those also cost him time)…
I’ve found that it gets a lot faster with practice.
Played the solo card game Friday, because it hasn’t left people’s solo lists since 2014. Very fun, but even on easiest difficulty this game is brutal! I squeaked a win, but was going through the aging deck like crazy to do it and got lucky with two very weak pirate cards.
The manual is… not great. Refers to the same pile by different names, assumes you already know things, and there’s a typo where it says “put this card on the right” when it should be “left”. (It would make absolutely no sense for the “+2 cards” power to put those extra cards on the right where they cost life. You could just draw two more cards paying for them normally, the +2 power wouldn’t need to exist. They have to be free cards on the left).
Other than that I… think I have all the rules correct? It’s a fun puzzle, but quite a hefty minimum play time to get through all 3 stages and 2 pirates every game.
So, so, so excited to be hearing about people on here playing! 
No offence to you I hope, but I like to learn the basics from the rules and other beginners before I play with people who know the game inside-out.
This is why I like it as a pbf game. You have time to fill notebooks with planning!
This was my fourth attempt to learn Bios: Genesis. I had hoped it would be easier to learn with the actual game in hand than on TTS. I watched a one hour teach video for my previous attempt.
The style of the rules of the Phil Eklund games is horrible with all their references and attempts to be short turning into obfuscation. I am not sure I will ever be able to play this solo or two handed… not even close to thinking I could teach this.
I am so sure there is an interesting game hiding inside of this but I can’t get through the jungle of the rulebook.
Some first plays this afternoon
The Field of The Cloth of Gold
A 2 player filler. Every turn involves giving your opponent something. Tense, thinky and so far, very good
Targi
Another 2 player game with some tight choices, you choose a direct action and an indirect action. I think this will get better with repeat plays.
Dominion Menagerie
The new expansion, featuring cards that pay out on your next turn, the ability to exile cards, singular events you can buy or one off cards that turn your actions into something else. We played the suggested curated set. It’s a bit odd and changes the game a lot. Like Targi it will need some exploring
Played LotR: Journeys in Middle Earth, partly because I read that the first two adventures are the hardest and the difficulty goes down as you add more advanced xp cards.
Well, with Legolas (Hunter) and Beravor (Pathfinder) the difficulty on normal was still ‘very high indeed’. I managed the first map, and took the advice to change Beravor to Burglar for the 2nd aventure battle map. This was good, because being Hidden was the only reason she stayed up during the fight, and Legolas was one Fear away from max. It does mean that I don’t get a 7xp Pathfinder card for adventure 3 though, as the xp from the battle map only goes to Burglar.
Succeeded (just) on adventures 1 and 2, next time I’ll try 3 onwards. It’s my fourth attempt on this - I got destroyed on my first go, then tried with three players and got overrun by enemies, tried the Easier mode with Aragorn and Gimli but it floods you with so much inspiration that there’s no game. I’m going to keep hammering away at Normal for now. Very interested to see what Gandalf and Arwen are like in the upcoming expansion.