Build your space station

🚀 Space Expatriate is a tableau-building game from Alkhwarizmi Games , a small indie publisher, released on SPIEL22.
In this game you build your space station by docking modules together, use your cards to gain resources and convert them into Terraforming Points, and establish colonies.

👉 On your turn you choose and dock a module card out of 4 (that wasn’t picked yet this round) and do the corresponding action of that color:

🟩 Delivery involves activating your green cards to bring resources from earth. You use resources to power yellow cards and use blue cards to earn TP. Unused resources go to the ‘space garbage’, which will make subsequent Delivery actions worse.
🟨 Engineering is the way to add new modules to your station.
🟦 Terraforming is how you start colonization missions to claim Colonies. Players having enough Colonies is the end-game trigger, but they also provide ongoing abilities that boost actions or provide TP in some way.
🟥 Military is the way to get new cards - you use tokens to check your military superiorities compared to others; the more you have, the more powerful the action.

You’ll need a good balance of TPs and Colonies, as you’ll need both for end game scoring!😉

☝️ I really like the “follow” mechanism in the game. The active player choosing the action gets a more powerful effect, but everyone else gets the basic benefits.

💬 When I first saw some of the cards I thought this would be like other resource conversion games, however there are several differences. A big twist of the game is how you periodically have to choose some cards to undock to gain a Colony. So you can’t just keep the perfect engine, sometimes you have to disrupt things and rebuild again.

💭 In a 4-player game all actions would be chosen every round, which would make it a lot more interesting I think. In 2p the round is over after 2 actions and you refresh - so you could indefinitely skip terraforming for example, which is the only way for the game to end. We’ll have to definitely explore this aspect at higher player count!