Spacers: Space Adventure Board Game (Xia: Faster. Smaller. Better?)

[Music] hey everybody welcome back to the dungeon dive Daniel here I hope you're doing well and if you're not I hope you are soon okay I know I've said this before but my favorite thing about working at the dungeon dive is being able to discover these small little under the radar games games that get almost no coverage anywhere else games that are made by a very small team sometimes only one person handling everything and I just I love uh I love that I'm able to do that it makes me really happy uh nothing makes me happier actually in this tabletop hobby space and today I am so happy to bring you just such a game and let me tell you this game is awesome and this game is called spacers a space adventure board game let's read a little bit about spacers here so find Fame and Fortune Among the Stars you are a spacer a freelance space traveler in a brand new solar system you have a ship a handful of space bucks and a wealth of opportunities how will you become famous spacers is a space adventure game where the goal is to become the most famous traveler in the solar system you are free to earn Fame in a variety of different ways allowing you to live out the space adventure fantasy that you want engage in pickup and deliver tasks dice based combat missions and even Choose Your Own Adventure style encounters so yes the designer of spacers contacted me and said he wanted to send me one of his copies of the game he said that people have called it Z Light and yes that's pretty much what it is it is highly derivative of Zia but you know what that's okay I love derivative games the practically the whole theme of the dungeon dive channel is just like only different almost all of the games that we cover on this channel are derivative of something else and sometimes the best games are the ones that are the most derivative because they can drill in they can they can focus in on the things that make their their their parent game good and then change things and actually make them better and in my opinion spacers is a better game than Zia it's smaller it's faster and it's better the turns are shorter it doesn't take up as much table space I think it has a better solo game I think it has uh more interesting Random Encounters and events and uh yeah there really isn't a downside to spacers the only thing that it's missing from Zia are the the customizable ships they not customizable you can customize your ships in this game but all of the ships that you could buy and the the the ships in Zia have a personality they have that story on the back and that's one thing that I really do like and that is one thing that is is missing from spacers but you know what that could easily be added by the designer and I know the designer is open to hearing suggestions for expansions so this game was uh had a failed crowdfunding campaign and the designer has turned to gamecrafter to release the game I highly encourage him to to go back to Kickstarter or something I think we could push it over the edge because I think this game deserves to be out there in a in a non-game crafter uh fashion because we all know I love gamecrafter some of you love gamecrafter but gamecrafter is very expensive because it's print on demand and it's very expensive for people outside of the United States to have stuff shipped to them so I would love to see this game have the success that it deserves because man is it ever good so I think what we'll do is we'll just kind of talk about each of the major components in a way that you would set up the game and in doing so I should be able to provide you with enough information to tell if this is a game for you or not so the first thing we'll do is we'll take a look at the star map here okay so this is your star map this is where the bulk of the action is going to take place and these are little hex tiles and at the beginning of the game you will set those up randomly in this configuration and you will always have your sun in the center and then there are different planets and the planets all have different names the red planet is called vanar the green planet is called anuman and these planets will correspond to a planet Planet track that we'll take a look at in a um in the next section of this video we also have asteroid fields and the planets you can land on and then you go to a landing Zone and then you can have a business phase at the planet and you can interact with the planet in in different ways and then we also have these asteroids and these asteroids kind of act as blockers it's dangerous to fly through asteroids if you fly through asteroids you will take I think it's three points of damage you will take four points of damage but you can make a roll and that will mitigate that much damage we'll talk about the roles a little bit in in the future as well but uh yeah so you can also land on an asteroid and you can mine materials and those are these orange cubes there and then we also have nebula and we have a blue nebula and the green nebula those are the same if you fly into a nebula you will take four points of energy damage but that can also be mitigated by a Dodge roll and a Dodge roll is just a roll of a D6 to mitigate some of that damage and there are ways that you can add you can modify your Dodge Roll by upgrading your ship but if you go into a nebula you can Harvest a plasma and plasma and materials the or or I think materials or uh minerals these are Goods these are Commodities that you can trade and you can sell on planets and then we also have these outposts and outposts don't have any specific rules associated with them but often events or missions will take place at those Outpost so those are often uh those are often goals that you want to fly to we also have this planet here and that is the shattered planet and the shattered Planet you can salvage for different types of cargo as well so that's kind of like a planet breaking up and you can fly there and you can salvage materials at that planet so that that is your your uh your space sector here your star sector it's really cool I love the way that the asteroids kind of um make almost a path that you might have to follow but uh there are moments during the game where things will shift around so they're not set in stone once you set it up you do need to shift around some tiles sometimes but uh setting up this map is a lot of fun and in a multiplayer game you will take turns setting up tiles in a Solo game you just set the sun down and then go in concentric circles around the Sun to set up your star sector okay now let's take a look at the what is the official uh place here what is the official name of this board called it is the status board I also want to mention that the rule book is really really well written I was surprised this is one of the better written rule books that I have seen on the game crafter it is concise it has everything uh is is present everything is well laid out and I had no issues at all learning this game this is definitely one of the games with a better documentation that I've seen on game crafter okay now let's take a look at the status board so when you land on a planet so if I were to land on the planet of zorya this gray Planet my ship I would take my ship from that planet and it cost one point of movement to fly into the landing zone so when you land on a planet you actually leave the star map and that's really cool I love that uh there was one game I was playing earlier where I couldn't I was where where's where's my ship on the star map and I was off the star map because I had landed on a planet and that little tiny detail I think just added a whole bunch to the game cuz it feels like you are actually going to this planet really cool I love that and certain things will only affect the star map and so when you're off the star map you don't have to worry about some things so let's take a look here at the bottom here we have these Planet features at the beginning of the game you will take a whole stack of Planet features I believe there's about 12 of them and you will lay out six of them and these are different ways that the planets can be modified and so every game your planets will have different modifications you might have a fight club on one planet or a shipyard or a casino or just a way to a way to modify each planet at the beginning of the game your ship will start on a planet and there's a lot of times during the game where you will have to randomize a planet and so you can look at this here so you roll a D6 on a five my ship will start on the red planet of vandar and because I'm starting there we reveal the planet feature and there's a mission network okay when drawing Mission cards draw an additional card so it's easier to pick up the missions that you want on vanar we'll go over the missions a little bit later so each one of these other uh Planet features only gets revealed when a when a ship lands on it when a player ship lands on it not an NPC ship because there are two MPC ships a merchant and a hunter at the start of the game you will also put 1,000 space bucks and yes that is a space Buck you will put a th000 space bucks on each planet that doesn't have a ship on the landing Zone and so that uh gives you an incentive to fly to those ships to pick up those space bucks and then at the beginning of the game you will also set up your Hunter and your Merchant and the merchant starts at the leftmost planet in the landing Zone and without without any other players and the hunter starts at the rightmost and then there's a track up here that shows their route where they are flying to so the merchant is going to be flying from this planet from bong to Han and the hunter is going to be flying from zoria to xandar and so what they will do on their turn they will make that route on the star sector when they land you will update where they are flying next and that is a loop so they will Loop so there is a rudimentary AI that handles the merchant and the hunter we'll talk a little bit more about them in detail in a bit we also have this Supply tracks and demand tracks Supply tracks these are the things that the planets have for sale and you take two of each so we take two Kims two bio and what are the Reds parts we randomize those and we will place those out so bang has Parts Han has bio Newman has uh Kim quoth has Kim vanar has parts and zoria has bio so those are things that you can buy for a thousand and then you might be able to sell those for more money than than you paid for on the planets that might have some demand and so for demand you will pick six random cubes from your bag and demand can never match Supply and so we'll do uh material so U minerals and plasma they can never be in Supply because you have to get those on the star map all right so mineral mineral High highly they're highly wanting mineral there on bang and Han so that can't match so we'll just move that over there that can't match we'll move that there and there we go so now we have our supply and demand tracks set up and the only other thing here that we have is our Fame track and in a typical game the players are competing to have to get seven Fame so it's a pretty quick game and you take one of your color uh wooden cubes there and you place that on zero so we are starting at Zer Fame I guess now is also a good time to talk about the solo game since we are setting up so the solo game the solo game is great in this I think it does a fantastic job we have some basic solo rules on a little a few little changes for setup and then we have a solo round tracker each round you will tick up when you reach one of these blue circles you will get to draw a boost card and boost cards are cards that you can uh use to power up uh your turn to modify your turn we'll talk about those in detail in a bit but um you don't have a round total you just when once you accomplish your goal you're looking at how long it took you to do and it's kind of a score chasing mode but to do that you need to still reach seven points of Fame but you have these uh solo objectives that will help you that will give you missions and will give you things that you need to do and you need to complete at least three of these and get seven points of Fame and you want to try to do that in as few turns as possible to do well and these solo objectives are things like act natural uh earn a Fame by completing a smuggling Mission Dead or Alive earn of Fame by completing a hunting Mission earn of Fame by completing a salvage Mission earn a Fame by discarding two blip tokens and when you do those at the beginning of the game you will Shuffle these up and you will draw five one 2 3 4 5 the rest are not used in this game and so these are your solo objectives for your solo game and when you accomplish one of these you can flip it over and you will get some kind of special ability that you will be able to use use for the rest of the game super cool super easy super functional and well implemented it's this game has a great solo mode additionally when you land on your planets you can take your business actions and the actions that you can take once everything is set up you can move you can attack you can do a science action a tinker action a salvage action an explore action repair or business phase if you are on one of the planets if you've landed on the landing Zone and the science tinker Salvage and explore those are how you interact with the various elements on the star map but when you are on a planet you can buy cargo sell cargo you can buy Tech we'll take a look at Tech in just a second and you can also recharge or repair your ship because your ship will have a hole and if it takes damage to the hole you will start having uh negative modifiers to your dice rolls and to your movement if you ever get down here you explode and then you also have energy and energy is spent like a currency to do certain things you can hold two pieces of cargo and you can up you can modify your ship with three different pieces of tech and those techs are up here we have cargo pods where you can carry more cargo we have thrusters and thrusters will give you a plus one to your Movement we have a cannon cannons will give you plus one to all of your attack rolls we have a Mech arm that will give you a plus one to all of your Tinker rolls we have a scanner a plus one to all of your science rolls and a stabilizer a plus one to all of your Dodge rolls and those are the shown the cost right there and then you can just apply those to your ship and your ship can have three of those and you can sell out unwanted ones and buy new ones because you often want to go land on a planet when you get a mission upgrade your ship to to accomplish that mission and then after you've accomplished the mission you can uh you can trade in your upgrades to help you on other missions so that is all of that let's take a look at the merchant and Hunter real quick so we have our little Merchant and Hunter card here each one of these NPCs starts off with 2,000 space bucks if a player destroys them they can take that money and they will also have to take some Bounty because as you earn Bounty other players can attack you uh you can pay to remove the Bounty when you're on a planet you can pay to give this bounty to another player for some take that that's pretty cool and also the hunter ship will hunt down the player with the most Bounty and they they will attack everything the hunter NPC will attack everything it can see in in the star sector uh within two spaces it'll even attack the merchant which is pretty cool and you'll keep track of the hunters and the um the merchants Health with these tokens there and if they ever get down to the red they uh they explode and the merchant is cool the merchant gets um up upgraded with more cargo and with more money in the last game I was playing there was a very wealthy Merchant who had a huge stack of cash and finally he had so much cash that I said you know what I'm going to risk getting the Bounty and attack the merchant for all of that cash and it was pretty cool and I actually had some really interesting uh ways that the events and the and the Random Encounters and missions worked together to where there were some rival merchants and the and rival Merchants were were offering to to pay me to take out this Rich Merchant that was flying around and and messing with the economy I thought that was really really cool so one of the final things you'll do when you set up is you will place out four of these blip tokens and these blip tokens will represent the various encounters that you can have the Random Encounters and oh my gosh the Random Encounters are so cool in this game so to set up the four blip tokens we will roll 2 D6 we'll do H blue first so 66 okay so a six and a six is a reroll we roll that a six and a two so a blip token will start in the green Outpost sector and the green Outpost is up here and you can place that in any empty hex in that tile okay 33 so 33 starts at the Blue Planet on the near the planet of Han which is right here we'll place that there and then we have 25 25 is uh near the red planet the vandar We'll add that there and 66 again 65 is at the red Outpost which is just uh there it is right there in the corner and we'll place that there and then on your turn if you were to fly off from a planet and you were to land on one of those blip tokens you could do a explore action and that's when you get to have a random encounter and these Random Encounters are fantastic I love these so we have a little uh cover here because the random encounter deck is two-sided but I don't really need that I can just draw from the back and so when you draw a random encounter you will have a little story you uh you see a small vessel dark and lonely hanging in the void you receive a message spacer thank the Stars this ship is done for I could use a tow to the nearest Planet hurry please I can pay you and then you get a choice do you want to attack the vessel tow the vessel or fly away that is so cool I love the use of this card right here so uh let's tow the vessel cuz I don't like playing a space and and so we tow the vessel there and you attach a tow cable to the vessel to bring the Hopeless soul to safety as you tow them the pilot shares the story of how they barely survive the blast of a solar flare you would gain 2,000 space bucks as a reward and that little uh check mark there means that you get to take that as a reward add that to your ship and then one of the ways to get Fame is to discard two of those uh two of these two of these blip tokens and you can get Fame that way so you can get Fame by exploring so ways to get Fame uh combat you can destroy a players ship with more Fame than you or you can also in the solo game there are some different ways for combat uh missions you can complete missions exploration discarding two blip tokens and trading if you sell two or more cubes that are in demand that is another way that you can get Fame tokens or fame points I should say and there are all kinds of Random Encounters here such as Patrol Under Fire a large conflict unfolds in front of you system Patrol ships are outnumbered by a squadron of Ruthless Pirates the law enforcement ships are calling out for Aid you can help the system Patrol or you can help the Pirates or you can just fly away and ignore it and both of these are going to be combat uh let's say that you wanted to be you wanted to role play as a space pirate so hey I'm going to help the Pirates I don't like the space Patrol I don't like space cops and so here we have help the space pirates make an attack roll so you would roll a D6 anytime it says make a roll you just roll a D6 where did my dice go there they are and then if you had a couple cannons let's say I had a couple cannons uh each Cannon gives me a plus one so I'll roll a D6 I'll add two a seven a seven or higher you eradicate the systems Patrol gain a bounty gain 4,000 space bucks and also gain that token as a reward and so sometimes it'll just say make a Dodge roll if you make a Dodge roll if you have any stabilizers then you can add to your Dodge if you are have a scanner you can add to your science roles if you have a Mech arm you can add to your tinker rols and so on let's take a look at one more here two ships Zip by you in an apparent chase the pursuing ship transmits a message stom that ship spacer the pilot is an escaped uh prisoner quickly disabled him help the pursuing ship help the flying the fleeing ship or fly away very similar to the other one just different theme sometimes you can find derel Cruisers which you can scan scrap or attack the vess you can board The Vessel or fly away sometimes flying away just makes you escape from that encounter sometimes you will have to do some reaction rules or some different things if you choose to fly away but having these Choose Your Own Adventure encounter cards adds so much theme to this game speaking of theme let's take a look at the mission cards when you are on a planet you can choose to take a mission you will get to draw three Mission cards and you can keep one I believe or is it two in one I can't remember you will get to draw a certain number of missions and keep one there will be other uh times where you can draw more and keep more and I believe you can have up to two active missions and missions become active when you do the first step on them so if you're playing a competitive game you will keep your missions a secret until you do that first step then you will will reveal it and at that point you can't abandon your mission you have to either succeed or fail if you you haven't yet started a mission you can abandon it in favor of another one that you might draw but here we have a mission bandn bio a black market Trader takes note of you you interested in some smuggling I need this load of Bio brought to quoth be real sneaky about it okay so you can't start on quof so if my ship was over here on Zona here uh zorya I should say then I could take this Mission and I would place two bio cubes from the bank into my ship and then I have to land on quoth and quoth is the yellow planet and the Y yellow planet is down here off camera let's just uh let's flop these just for sake of the video here all right so I have to land on quoth and then I have to make a Dodge roll because I have to be sneaky and a Dodge roll again is a D6 Roll But if I had more stabilizers I could add a bonus to this so I actually had this mission in my last game and after I drew the mission I decided to also upgrade my ship and I bought some stabilizers so I could make sure to pass that Dodge roll cuz I didn't want to be scanned you know you're not dodging a space fire there you're being you're being sneaky and so this was a really super super cool thing that happened I want to find that other card so I had that mission and then there was an event that happened and it was this pirate blockade and so this pirate blockade these Pirates will set up a blockade around a planet I rolled up a random planet and it happened to be quoth and so quoth had a pirate blockade around it and to signal that you will take one of these little event tokens and put the event token there and then the hunter ship was also taking off from zorya and so I was flying towards quoth the hunter was after me because I'm the only player playing in a Solo game the the hunter took a shot at me because I had upgraded my ship with some stabilizers I was able to Dodge that attack and then I decided to attack the space pirates rather than paying them the bounty to land or the bribe to land and I attacked them and I defeated the space pirates I was able to get into quoth I failed my Dodge roll but on a turn before I had stopped at another planet at some time and I had this planet bonus here where I was able to pay I think it was a th000 space bucks and I could put one of my tokens on that card and he was an it was represented an Insider that I could call for a favor and if I did that I could add a bonus to any die roll and so I called my buddy on Newman and I said hey I need some help uh passing this scan on qua so I can deliver this Contraband and I used that power and I was able to succeed and all of that all of that that emergent narrative It All Happened due to random things that came out and that is something that I noticed over and over with this game is how how many cool emergent narrative moments just continued to happen and to build upon each other and to snowball and to Cascade one turn after another it was one of the most exciting times I've had playing a game but there are all kinds of different missions there are tinkering missions Salvage missions shipping missions hunting missions smuggling and each one has a little bit of a different path and you might have to do some combat and you will have a little bit of flavor Tex but these Mission cards are amazing I love them and also these event cards these event cards are super cool so you will draw an event card at the beginning of the game and you will place a white token there and this event will uh stay on the board it'll stay active for this many turns so this tax season card will stay active for three full turns and on this card it says that the the interplanetary government needs money immediately to fund some ambiguous project an information packet will be issued with three to four within three to four business years while on a planet so if you land on a planet you have to place 2,000 space bucks on the appropriate space on this card to make your mandatory payment any players that have not paid by the time this event ends will receive one Bounty so if you were playing this in a in a multiplayer game each player within three turns would have to land on a planet and then pay two bucks to this card in order to not gain a bounty super cool we have the rising Merchant a highly successful Merchant has been spotted in the system no doubt spacers will be flocking from all across the sector to conduct business with them this lasts for two turns you pay 2,000 on the merchant while uh adjacent to the merchant players May perform a business action to purchase any cargo cubes of a single type for a th000 each okay we have the space-time Paradox this last for two turns an outrageously responsible experiment has created a strange shift in SpaceTime the scientists responsible for this will be put on trial as soon as they are old enough to speak okay so we have a that stays out for two turns let's see players may now move between planets by moving their ships along the landing zones oh so you can just hop from one planet to the next interesting I've never seen that event let's look at one more a Shifty Merchant a wealthy trade Baron has placed a bounty on a merch merch a note has been attached on the Bounty listing uh send that double crossing plasma huffing pile of space rot to the void place a bounty token on the Merchant's card destroying the merchant while it has a bounty will not cause the player to gain a bounty if the merchant is destroyed this event uh immediately ends the effects of this event remain in play even after this event ends and until the merchant is destroyed interesting so there are a quite a few number of different events and they're all cool they all change up the game in really interesting ways and I think the final thing we haven't looked at are the Boost cards and boost cards are special powers that you can gain and you can have up to a hand of four and these are just ways to mitigate bad luck ways to to modify your turns you can have better evasion uh an escape pod a sh a shuttle you can uh you can gain energy back you can use a you can have a slingshot probably around a planet um and AAP pod there another slingshot a shuttle a reboot so these are just ways to help mitigate the luck ways to maybe make your turns more interesting and again there are different ways to get these you can buy these when you are on planets you can get them as rewards and you can have up to a hand of four at any one time so yeah that's uh that's spacers space adventure board game Z Light Zia smaller faster better I think uh this game will hit my table a heck of a lot more than Z I like a lot but it's a lot it's a lot of game it takes up a lot of table space um the the turns are long the games can be long this game is just it's pep Zia and it has almost everything I look for everything that I love about Zia is here but truncated and all of the good stuff is still here the one thing it is missing of course are those special ships and I would love for an expansion for this to have those kinds of special ships that we can buy another reason why I want that is there needs to be something bigger for you to spend your money on by the end of my last game I was just swimming in space bucks and um there was nothing really for me to buy and so if I had something that I could spend you know five 10,000 space bucks on on a new ship that would help the economy of the game a lot more and give that story give those little background stories because uh the designer here who wrote the flavor text the flavor text is really good so I have confidence that they could write some cool flavor text for the various ships and just having those different ships with different abilities and a little bit of a different personality would go a long way to making this game even better even better better times two Z but the event cards are great the mission details are great the planet features that are randomized every game fantastic I love this whole planet board I love the way that the merchant and the hunters interact with you while you were playing solo I think it might be cool if each one of these planets so six planets had a little event deck associated with the planet that you could maybe do an explore action while you were on the planet so maybe you landed on bong here and you uh you got out of your ship and you went and you found some kind of cave or some kind of little point of Interest like in Starfield or something that could be really cool a way to use your explore actions on the planet to get Fame that might might be an idea for a little expansion as well but as it is I love spacers I want to see this game be a success I feel like this is kind of like my pet project now like uh like like Rogue dungeon was when I discovered that on gamecrafter I wanted that to succeed so bad and I want the same fate for spacers so I I I've talked to the designer and after this video posts he is going to start a crowd sale on on on gamecrafter so that will help to bring the price down a little bit and I would encourage them I think I think there will be enough people on who watch the dungeon dive who want something like this to make a new crowdfund successful because yeah I think this game needs to be a success it's awesome I love this game it's will most definitely make my top 10 of the year that I've played for the first time so all right guys well I hope you enjoyed this look at spacers we will talk to you later bye-bye [Music]