Explore the lost fleet!

It has been way too long since we played 🛸 Gaia Project! It is considered to be among the very best euro games ever created, and there is a reason for that - it is just that darn good. 🙌 We were quickly reminded of that as we started playing after a long hiatus. The economy of the game is tight so you need to make strict plans, yet there is always an opportunity to find that last missing resource or something you are looking for. There are always an array of things to do on any given round and all of them are fun and valid. There is huge variability thanks to asymmetric factions, a modular map and many other components. It really really is incredible. 🥰

It was also our first time playing with the Lost Fleet expansion which adds quite a few things to the game which I find very exciting. 😁

First of all the namesakes: ☝️ the abandoned ships of the Lost Fleet floating in space. You can land on these 3-4 ships if you can reach them to gain access to their special actions and tiles. From then on when you gain a reward you can choose from the things on the ship as well.

There are also 2 new player colors with 2 factions each - so 4 new asymmetric factions with juicy new abilities! 💪 These don’t have a home planet type, instead they start out on the new asteroid or protoplanet type and each have a special way of terraforming the normal planet types. Interestingly, some of the older factions have also received some small balance changes. 😮

The modular map is changed too, introducing these asteroids, protoplanets and the Lost Fleet ships. However instead of new big map tiles you get single and triple-hex tiles that are placed in between the normal big tiles to make up a slightly bigger map. It’s a pretty clever way to solve this. 🙂

Finally, there are more new components like technologies, federation tiles, boosters and goals. Some of these are mixed into their pools, some are only available through the Lost Fleet ships. They add even more variety to a game that is already filled to the brim with variety. But I can’t complain - they just made one of the best games even better. 😉