Description

During the game, the player builds a deck of cards that represents a scientific base operating in alien territory.

The game switches between Relief Steps, where you choose new cards to add into your deck, and Combat Steps, where alien waves of increasing difficulty are fought. Both enemy waves and cards eligible to be recruited are randomized (drawn from a previously shuffled deck).

During Combat Steps, your military cards can be played to destroy aliens or to repair your defenses. Then, surviving aliens damage your base back, deactivating your Shields and eventually lowering its Constitution rating.

Your scientific cards grant victory points and useful abilities, but eventually clog up your deck leaving your base vulnerable. Pursuing sinergetic card combinations and keeping the right balance between scientific and military assets is essential.

Aliens cannot be defeated. Game continues until your base is destroyed (by reaching 0 Constitution) and the game is lost, or the player decides to evacuate, cashing out the acquired victory points into a final score rating.

From the moment the evacuation is requested until it actually happens, two more waves of aliens must be fought, so pushing your luck too far might end in failure.

-description by the designer

Aliens have no technological nor numerical advantage. Humanity is unable to stop their slow advance due to the strange dimensional energy that surrounds them, against which our weapons and defenses are unprepared. This Anomaly is an unknown force, that only our dreams and subconscious may perceive.

We're vulnerable to its terror and delirium, but our scientists claim that this weakness comes with the potential for mastering it. Many survivors of the invasion have been elevated to a higher psionic state.

Now we're focused on Astalos, a terraformed quadrant under enemy control, still wrapped in traces of Anomaly. Our plan is to deploy there different operational bases so that our scientific personnel can carry out tests and measurements.

Our presence will attract hostile response. General, your mission is to defend one of those bases to the best of your ability, so you can then withdraw with the maximum amount of data and samples. You'll be deployed and evacuated by a Class IV Frigate, that will be kept hidden in supraorbital location and therefore will only be able to provide limited support.

You'll get the details during the transfer. Dismissed.

-from the rulebook