Celestial Conquest

Introduction

You are the new leader of a civilisation on the cusp of inter-solar-system travel. You have one experimental exploration ship which is able to safely travel at Hyperlight speeds, and open Hyperlanes for more ships to follow. Grow your civilisation, trade, negotiate and battle your way to galactic rule.

Setup

Players: Ideally 3-4+. You can play with 2, but you effectively skip trade and negotiation because it's practically never beneficial to work together.

Tracking stats:The game is relatively involved. You definitely want a notebook, but I'd recommend some kind of spreadsheet to keep track of your income. 'Dice' rolls are often odd numbers, like 5, so you might also want a digital dice you can use.

The board:This is not a printed board game - you'll need to create a map. I've used a whiteboard for this in play testing. This also means you can vary the size and shape of the map to match whatever scenario you want to play. This photo shows an example board for a two player play-test.

System cards:You will also want a way to draw new systems as they are discovered. I've used blank playing cards with the following stats written on: Suitably sci-fi name, colinisable planet count, ore extraction zone count, research zone count. These values should be in the range of 0-5. Highly resource-available systems should be relatively rare.

Starting Materials

Players start with the following resources:

The Game Loop

  1. Resource Collection

    All players collect resources from any active sources - Research installations, ore extractors, trade routes and colonies. The base outputs are:
    Type Ore Output Credit Output (K) Research Output
    Research Station 0 0 5
    Extractor 5 0 0
    Colony 3 50 0
    Trade Lane 0 Length * 100 0

  2. Negotiation and Research

    See Trade. A player can also choose to do up to 1 research per research tree at this time.

  3. Construction

    All players simultaneously build any trade lanes, ships, research stations, resource extractors, colonies
    Type Ore Cost Credit Cost (K)
    Research Station 250 250
    Extractor 50 400
    Colony 275 500
    Trade Lane Length * 500 Length * 1000

  4. Movement & Combat

    After negotiations are complete, players privately decide what actions they are going to take. This could be: All the players' actions are revealed and executed simultaneously but may be resolved in any order deemed appropriate by the players.