Last night I managed to pull out Xia Legends of a Drift System for the first time in a few years. Great sandbox game, if you haven’t played it… kinda like Elite Dangerous but 1000x easier or EVE Online but with way fewer spreadsheets.
Joking aside, it is a really beautiful, clever, and slightly sluggish open world where you can explore, or trade, or go bounty hunting, or focus on missions… lots of options. I included the Embers expansion, which adds more chaos, but also a neat semi-closed economy to prevent people from doing short loops (Go to Planet A, buy all the Cargo X you can, fly to Planet B, sell all Cargo X and get money and VPs, and repeat).
Basically, the amount of Cargo Y on a planet is determined by a little board, and once that amount is purchased, that’s it. Ain’t no more… unless somebody sells Cargo X to that planet, which generates more Cargo Y. You can almost always go mining (once viable Mining/Harvesting/Salvaging locations are discovered), and those can be used to feed into the economy if you want.
By the end of our game, we had still failed to discover one of the links in the production chain, which meant we had a tonne of Cyber resource (no planet buying it), but no Terra (because to produce Terra, you need to sell Cyber to the planet that buys it), and correspondingly no Plasma or Holo (the next two resources down the chain)… but that encourages players to diversify from just Pick Up And Delivery missions, which is nice.
I picked 15VPs (technically "FP"s, since it’s Fame Points) as a stopping point, and Justin managed a decisive victory, nailing 4 VPs on his final turn. Really neat game, and I think the Expansion helps a lot with the flow of the game (especially the optional rule to not look at or choose Mission Cards until after your turn is over).
9.5/10, would Merchant slash Pirate again.
The fact that no one murdered anyone else should be declared as a win.
