Stars of Akarios - A casual unboxing

[Music] hey everybody welcome back to the dungeon dive daniel here i hope you are doing well and if you're not i hope you are soon okay today we are just going to do an unboxing of stars of acarios uh this is a big kickstarter game that just got delivered to me last week and so i wanted to take a look at what is in this box i have a feeling that i am going to quickly sell this game and that is not passing judgment whatsoever on the game i know next to nothing about it i just have this feeling because when i backed this game i think it was like two or three years ago i was way more or thought i was way more into these kind of long uh narrative based adventure games and as time has gone on and as fans of the channel know my patience for my desire to play big narrative campaign games has all but vanished so i really don't have any opinion about the game but i do have an opinion about what i am into now as a gamer and i have a feeling i'm going to you know get this set up get this learned and you know learning to play it and start to play it and have a feeling that it's going to kind of slot in that same that same uh space as as a gloom haven or as a as a medara as these these kind of just big story games that will take up a lot of time that just aren't for me aren't worth the effort but i do think this game looks pretty cool and i'm going to give it a good try because who knows maybe this will be one of the big epic large campaign games that will win me over we will have to see but let's take a look at the back of the box here it's a pretty hefty box i think it's about the same size as uh like role player adventures but this says stars of acario stars of acarios is a narrative driven cooperative campaign game for one to four players set in the acarios galaxy a typical session of play will start as players interact with the galaxy map and scout their next scenario as part of space exploration this scenario may result in space combat world exploration or discovering more about the galaxy players will progress in the story of stars of aquarius as they explore and venture further across the galaxy the story of the sprawling the story is a sprawling narrative see that right there i'm just kind of like oh what did i you know i think i bit off more than i can chew the story is a sprawling narrative with opportunities for players to choose how to shape the story players will meet many memorable characters discover unexplored regions of space and unravel the mysteries of stars of acarios so it definitely like i mean my imagination is kind of like sparking right now it's kind of like firing off like i wonder what kind of things i can discover but then again i'm like oh i wonder how long it's going to take me to discover those things and am i going to be able to leave it set up long enough um you know you guys get the drill but um one to four players 20 minutes per player that's i highly doubt that unless unless maybe this game is really in small bite-sized chunks and hey that could be pretty cool all right let's open this bad boy up and see what we got so i have taken a quick look at some of the stuff in here i haven't opened up everything um here we have this is just kind of a map of the different galaxies here i don't think this has any gameplay ramifications it's just kind of a tchotchke kickstarter thing and on the top here we do have our uh punch boards okay so these are the punch boards i do like that there are there are not a ton of punch boards that's kind of cool let's see uh we've got some enemy ships here so there was a way that you could get all these all of these um enemy ships purchased as minis but i went for the standee version yay standees so glad they offered that so we've got some enemy ships and some um some star sectors here some nebulae maybe they have pretty good quality they feel nice pretty i would say like standard you know good kickstarter quality we have some more enemy ships there and these will like stand up and they will go on your your map there looks like um some different ships here invictus mercava gnosis charis on argonaut uh maybe some different pilots or something starla violet ray garden and invar probably some characters there all right and very similar sheet here more of the enemies more of the pilots maybe the pilots or characters some more ships there and here we have our uh planet sectors some asteroid fields it looks like i do like that there are not just a ton of like status chits that is pretty nice this as far as the chits go this looks more manageable than a lot of games of this size so i do appreciate that for sure these are the player boards uh pretty nice dual layer double layer i am hoping that the game actually does play well you know true solo with just one hero one ship one crew one pilot however you play the game um just so it can fit on my table i hope i don't have to juggle a whole bunch of these but these look pretty well organized we have our little spot for our pilot there it does look like these are like the pilots so that would slide in there if you wanted to play this uh yolindo person there being i should say being person there and they slot right in that's kind of cool and it looks like we probably have what our ship here does that go like that yeah possibly so you can uh lift that out okay that's pretty nice i do i do like that it seems like things are are well maintained on this board you've got a spot for some tokens or some some cubes there a little spot for some basic actions sorry i should have been holding this up uh yeah cubes cubes cubes your basic actions there spots for your engines pilot ability ship ability a couple different tech sectors uh looks like more cubes to go there okay pretty nice nicely made good good production that's for sure so we've got how many of those one two three four okay so that's going to be for each of our characters or each of our players i should say and then we come to of course the game trays the new hotness everybody loves the game trays i'm sometimes they can be really nice sometimes they can limit if you needed to add things to the box you know things need to be packed a certain way and for the most part game trays they make it so it fills up the whole thing so it's a double-edged sword it can't be really nice like in games like role player adventures or um the game we just took a look at uh dice throwing adventures so so i i i can deal with these and i would also be happy if they if the game didn't come with them because i could just have my own storage solution but this is kind of nice a really big game tray here for all of our cards okay so what do we have here we've got a whole bunch of different cards one two three four five six seven eight nine 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 uh various decks of cards here so i have heard uh this game described as shorthand is gloomhaven in space i'm sure that's going to make some people very happy i don't know how i feel about that yet but these look like little uh modifier decks here much like gloom havens so yep you got your misses you get your times two you have these are all your modifiers so it does have some card play that is going to be uh similar to to uh gloomhaven in that regard and then we also have some ships here so we have let's see our ship abilities so these will be slotted on our character sheep so each one of these has a few abilities argonaut the gnosis the invictus the merkava the charis the vicar the orlox the evram and the howler and the guntal let's see here so we have one two three different abilities lots of iconography not a lot of flavor text so i'm not really sure what these do yet but i'm sure we'll learn in good in due time there we've got those we've got another um another deck of ability cart or modifier cards here so more modifiers um see now here's yeah i don't know about these modifier cards i'm not sure i'm not sure how i feel about them i wasn't quite sure how i felt about them in gloomhaven it seems like something that a dice could easily use i don't know i don't know you could simulate with a dice you wouldn't have to have so many components or maybe a table i'm not sure maybe it's a really cool i don't know but another i mean i would have probably rather had seen this cardboard been used for more story more flavor stuff more uh random encounters it just seems like it just seems like a lot of cards okay here we have some pilot abilities pilot abilities more modifier cards man so many of these modifier cards looks like you're gonna be doing a little bit of deck building as you go through adding good cards taking away bad cards so i know people really like that in gloomhaven a lot let's see a few abilities for each of the pilots so here we have starla and what do we have motivational speech stress reduction wingman and sacrifice take a look at a couple others here we have a violet array mimic outmaneuver focus and exploit okay so those are kind of the very very mechanical type of abilities there that i'm sure will help as you progress through the campaign we have co-pilot abilities okay that's kind of cool so you can have like a crew perhaps your your co-pilot can help out different co-pilot abilities bellar blarne darzo so looks like there's all kinds of different uh co-pilots and that's a lot of empty space on these cards you know sometimes you look at a card in a game and you think oh man i cannot wait to like encounter that card and the game and see what that does uh this just kind of does it doesn't do much for me uh very very sterile i i guess that kind of fits with the uh science fiction theme of the game but um yeah just kind of looks very dry i guess you could say dry mechanical might be a good way of uh of explaining the way these cards look so far um the sparrow what we got here the sparrow oh well a bunch of sparrow cards here upgraded cannons a different kinds of attack and modifiers looks like advanced controls uh tech cards here so these are probably going to wait ways that you can upgrade your tech tech tree 30 there are going to be looks like about 45 different tech options here advanced controls um upgrading your whole yeah i get so far like these cards really aren't doing much for me in terms of like getting me excited about the game and what do we have here we have different uh these are going to be our different engines that we can upgrade all of our engine deck here 38 different upgrades or so deep strike stealth move attack move regenerating whole quick thinking take command repair bubble low burn interference overload okay kind of all kinds of different ways that we can upgrade our engine and use that and what do we have here weapon upgrades you know without a lot of art and cool stuff on the cards i would say like this could be done on a character sheet and just looking up in a book i don't know these look these look a little more interesting reaching shot um energy explosion flashing light kind of cool i do like these these attack cards i think i like the car i think i like the way the cards look in something like zaya legends of the drift system a little more uh what do we have here enemy combat cards enemy combat and some story cards so we have some events here and that's kind of cool i like these i would have liked to have seen a whole heck of a lot more um hopefully there are more events in a 50-hour campaign i think i would want more than 20 or so events but uh maybe maybe this gets added to uh augmented by the book or something and then we have our various enemy combat cards probably just going to show different ways that the ai is going to interact with us when we go into combat i would have liked to have seen like you know two times an event deck four times this size and fewer of these little modifier cards that look kind of boring there it's like these are probably our enemy stack cards we've got scouts ronin frigates uh fighters cool look i like the anime look the shadings and the colors a cruiser titan science of vessel a beacon assault a roller a mammoth dart and an air knot okay and what do we got here we've got more enemy combat cards more enemy combat cards and more enemy combat cards so these would be the cards that are going to dictate the ai of the enemies that we are fighting we've already taken a look at some of those there and then we have our kind of our planet exploration so this is one of the aspects of the game that i thought sounded pretty interesting where you kind of have this little uh you know um seventh content seventh continent style exploration where you have these cards and you're going to be going on these little adventures throughout these alien worlds this seems like the coolest part of the game to me just from when i was looking at the kickstarter and we have a fulia we have um chuco okay i'll just look at these real quick i want to spoil too much okay and then that'll be the red that'll be the last of those that we look at but then we have uh cho sec monsters okay that's kind of cool okay let's take a look at this one this one seems like it might be kind of cool this is like an interior and yeah so this this part of the game is excites me and we have a synthetic titan all right there and then we have a whole nother deck of these let's see how many different environments there are so so far we have four and then we have here we have jutsu okay nice little deck of cards there for jutsu and then we have patrum uh this was a large one quite large here all right and then we have one more deck of these kind of um exploration cards here so we have a cho sec i have a smaller one a smaller planet we have a gerarch nice large one and fair work okay so as far as the different environments go we have one two three four five six seven eight and nine different environments to explore that's cool that this part of the game i think looks really interesting and i'm hoping it is as fun as it looks all right let's get the lid back on here so that is most i think most of the cards that come and then we get a whole bunch of little checkbooks little notepads here that have all of our different ships you have starla gourd k2 yarden violet ray dusty and invar i'm not sure what all of these uh icons mean but it looks like you're going to be keeping track of your of your ship there and like its abilities and all that so a character sheet for your ships and then each of our heroes each of our captains has their own little box here where you're going to keep keeping uh all of your probably your modifier deck and your mini so the heroes do come with minis and the pilots do come with minis uh what do we got here so we have our our basic modifier deck gonna be a bunch of zeros and ones and maybe like one times two i'm not going to open those um we have our ships here see how that goes on there how what direction is the curve okay so it's going to be something like that there's our main little enemy or our hero ship there and then i this is one of our probably one of our captains one of our pilots there and you will get four of those get that one there that one and that one there so we get four places to hold all of our uh stuff for our heroes we have all of our plastic cubes here different colors to keep track of things on our ships we have here we have the sparrows that's kind of a large i think this is kind of a large probably a boss type ship there trauma cards this tray hold that uh we have a couple of more notebooks here we have uh act two three act one okay so these are uh campaign sheets here how to keep track of your campaign um another uh pilot or ship that yo yolindo or i think yolinda was one of the pilots right and then we have our hex our big hex board so this is going to be where we're going to be laying those little tiles and what i like about this is the board is nice and small it's just a nice uh three-fold little um hex hex uh hex map and here we have some planets on one side and just a nice space field on the other side i do like that it is nice and small that is super cool so hey maybe the game will actually fit on my table okay now i have opened up the rule books i did want to take a look at the rule book real quick and our scenario book so you know you guys know i'm not super into big fat scenario books they can be fun but they fill me with apprehension so this one is a giant not quite madara size but it is gloomhaven size the rulebook i was surprised by how slim the rule book was it the rulebook was only about 35 pages it looks nice looks it looks nicely laid out i have not read it yet not exactly sure um i haven't heard too many good things or bad things i haven't heard my my uh my view is completely neutral so far on the rule book there uh but we have our scenario book and this the the campaign i know is broken up into three acts and i believe it does have a tutorial where you kind of learn to play as you go through this first part of your scenario book and it does have some qr codes that you can scan where i think you can watch videos to learn so hopefully the ease hopefully it's an easy game to to get uh to get into you know hopefully there isn't a big time commitment up front just to learn the game but um yeah does look pretty pretty involved okay it does look like there are quite a few entries in here that deal with um that deal with encounters so maybe that encounter deck is not all of the random encounters that that is good that is good so yeah lots of encounters in here not a lot of art doesn't look like hardly any art most of it is pictures of the board for setup um it does look like the setup is quite probably a lot faster than gloomhaven so that is one thing i enjoy there aren't a ton of tiles so that that that's good that is a good thing and then finally these books down here okay so what do we have we have some enemy um boards here where you're gonna be putting your enemy cards there and keeping track of probably their shields and power and that kind of thing okay so there's our enemy cards there we've got more enemy trays there and then we do have this deck of cards here um we do get a couple different uh cheat sheets to help us keep track of different various aspects of the game and then we have these large kind of exploration cards and these are all of these systems these these star systems so it looks like we have our system here the idestreas system and then these are going to be kind of like those seventh continent style um exploration cards for our different star systems so we have one we have the draconian system we have the tracian system [Music] that's a large system there and the vertis system so again things that you can be exploring during the game that's cool this is another part of the game that excites me i like this this is these two exploration the the exploration cards where you're on the planet and through the systems that is the main reason why i backed the game and then we have a few little minis in here here we do have some dice so it does look like the card play is augmented with some dice rolling okay that's good we have our uh standy holders there and a few minis here uh mainly just for the uh the hero ships i believe all of the enemies are going to be uh represented by standees and it looks like we have a few more um hero or captain minnie's there so yeah all in all looks like a pretty good package i'm pretty i i'm pretty positive that a lot of people are going to be super into this game it looks interesting i just know myself i know the kind of game that i am into right now and it's probably not a game like this but i am going to set it up i'm going to go through those tutorial missions kind of get a feel for it get a feel for the ratio of like reading of scenario stuff compared to gameplay stuff and just how how much uh crunch there is to the game just to kind of see if it is my kind of game and hopefully i'll be back with some uh good news sometime in the near future all right guys well i hope you enjoyed this unboxing video of stars avicarios we will talk to you later bye