Description

Races of the Expanse is a game of creating an alien race, or human variant race by shuffling multiple decks of cards together, and then using your race to explore and colonize the Expanse of space between the Orion Spur and the Sagitarius arm. We plan to bring the game to Kickstarter this Fall. In Races of the Expanse each player takes turns picking a deck for their base creature, such as Crystaline, Humanoid, Crustacians, or Octopoids, Then in reverse order players choose a special ability Deck from clairvoyant, aquatic, subterranean, or creative. Your random homeworld will then add a regional events deck. These three decks will be Shuffled together, to form your races play deck. Extra races and abilities are planned as stretch goals. finally a communal planets deck is built based on the number of players. Play proceeds clockwise from a random start player.
All players start with a hand of five cards. Player 1 plays up to two cards, and then draws two cards, unless affected by cards or special abilities. Players may have no more than 10 cards in their hand. If, after drawing, you have more than ten cards, discard until you have only ten. If a player runs out of cards in their deck they shuffle their discarded cards and start the deck fresh. Play moves clockwise until the last planet is drawn. (Planets can only be drawn when Explorers are played.) When the last planet is drawn, each player gets one last turn, and then the game is ended and a winner is decided.
The player with the most resource at the end of the game is the winner. You get resource by having the most population on a planet. If two or more players have an equal amount of population on a planet, nobody gets the resource for that planet. The max population of a planet is in the upper lefthand corner of the planet card, the resource of that planet is in the lower righthand corner of the planet card.