While Covid has continued to keep my gaming group from meeting in person, it hasn’t kept us from getting together to game virtually. Luckily we have found a couple of great systems to use online…Boardgame Arena and Tabletop Simulator. Since March 20th, 2020 we have met weekly on Friday nights using one of these two platforms, and been able to play pretty much anything that I own in my collection…and in fact have tried several new ones and added them to my personal collection.

This past Friday we dove back into one that I had picked up a hard copy of right before lockdown went into effect, but hadn’t gotten a chance to pay yet….The Expanse. Being a huge fan of The Expanse universe has kept this one on my list of games that must get to the table once all this is over. I’m glad we finally got a chance to try it out.

The game works a lot like several of the GMT Coin Series games….where you are playing an area control game with a card driven mechanism that forces you to choose operational points or the event on a card. This game is a GREAT introductory game to the COINS series…it plays very much like a simplified Fire On The Lake…so if you like this one…and want more depth, check out FOTL.

Sorry for the sidetrack…back to The Expanse. The game board features the Sol galaxy, broken down into four sections: inner planets, belt, outer planet Jupiter band, and outer planet Saturn band. There are four factions in the base game: Mars, UN, OPA, and Protogen. The factions are ranked in a player priority level for use in a 2, 3, or 4 player game…meaning that Protogen will only be used in a four player game and OPA only in a 3 or higher player count. Each faction has a pregame setup, where they are in control of certain stations and orbitals.

Lets go into that a bit more…Orbitals & Stations. You see you gain control of a station (places like Tycho Station, Cyres, continents of Earth, etc…) by having the majority of control cubes on that square. If it is a tie, you resort to who owns the orbit (Orbitals) around that station…this is determined by who has the most ships in the space area around that station. The ships also play a big role in that you can only place an influence ( I like to think of the influence as troops, gorillas etc…) is by having a ship in space above the station. So by using your influence and your ships you are trying to spread your faction throughout as many systems of the board as possible.

So the cards…I did mention this is a card driven game (CDG)…lets look at those a little closer. Each card will have an event at the bottom of the card bordered with the factions that are eligible to use that event, and along the top of the card there are action points (aka Op Points). While the event can always be used by a listed faction, the Op points can be used by any faction to perform actions on the board…things like move fleets, place influence, and build fleets. The card play is very interesting in that, if you pick to use Op Points on a card, your opponents that are listed on the event of the card, may take that action while you use the Op Points! Those factions get the opportunity to do this in initiative order (only the first person to act on it may use the event…once its used it gets discarded)…and IF you chose to use the event, you get moved to the bottom of the initiative track! What a cool idea…use your cool power, but risk not being able to use the next one at the most opportune time because you have now moved all the way down the initiative track!

Another really interesting aspect to the action economy of the game is that you must spend your victory points in order to buy these cards from the draw pile. There is always one that is free, but after that it will cost you anywhere from 1 to 2 victory points (they call them CPs…not sure what it stands for lol). So you can jump down the card track and buy an awesome card before the other factions can, but it might cost you more than you really want to spend.

The game will continue until a 6th score card pops up on the card track. At that point you will do the final scoring round and the game ends. Our three player game ran around 2 hours, and that included the teach…so it will move much quicker next game. There are several other details that make the game pop and embrace the theme of The Expanse…things like the still pictures from the series, faction abilities, and if you pick up Doors & Corners expansion you get protomolecule, leaders, more tech upgrades for your ship etc… The game is one of the best kept secrets in gaming…I don’t see this one talked about ANYWHERE…but it is well worth the cheap price. Wizkids doesn’t do much to publicize their games, and the bells and whistles aren’t there either (I upgraded my ships with 3d printed ones from Etsy), but don’t be fooled…the game is good…really good. And if you like it, there are many other CDG games out there that have a similar action economy but pack even more depth.

Bottom line…do yourself a favor and check this one out!!