While sheltering-in-place during our present global circumstances, I had the privilege to playtest the upcoming expansion to SpaceCorp, titled SpaceCorp: Ventures. One of my favorite parts of the new game is the updated solo play options, especially the custom competition HQ! This article completes our solo play-through with New Nomads, as we head into the Starfarers Era.

We’ve made it to Starfarers! The strategy for Starfarers can be hard to understand, but if you’ve played Mariners and Planeteers with an eye on Starfarers the strategy will feel less daunting. For those who haven’t played SpaceCorp solo yet, here’s the kicker: when you get to Starfarers, the competition teams skip the star tracks entirely and are placed directly on the star. Unlike the other eras, time is your enemy in Starfarers. You need to get ahead of the competition and end the game as quickly as possible! Once the competition has teams spread across the board their Profit will rapidly outpace yours due to how they Explore, Build, and place colonies (it can sting to watch it unfold turn after turn!).

Like I mentioned in an earlier article, getting the 1st Beyond marker is critical for a competitive start against the competition in Starfarers. WIthout it, they place a team at Alpha Centauri and Luhman 16 and take 3 turns in a row. With it, they only place a team at Luhman 16 and you get a team at Alpha Centauri, which is a huge bonus. Like in all previous eras, the competition’s first 6 cards are predictable, in the sense that no two are identical. If you’ve built a decent Move engine in Planeteers, you can move onto the Luhman 16 star track within 1 or 2 turns, getting you to the star before the previously placed competition has a chance to do anything with that team.

My major strategic consideration in this game is that my HQ – New Nomads – starts with the Hybrids Progress card, allowing for 2 different bases at one Primary site. This is a huge bonus to start with but is balanced by the inability to use my Settle power at sites with more than one discovery location. I also start with 4 teams. This changes initial strategy choices; do I go after the single discovery sites first, in order to settle the larger sites that typically yield more opportunity? Or do I go straight for the multi-discovery regions and try to block the competition? If the competition acquired the 1st Beyond marker in Planeteers, they’ll already have two teams on single discovery site regions: Luhman 16 and Alpha Centauri.

Of course this strategic choice should factor in the Contracts: when playing the New Nomads I like to go for the 4th contract, bases in 3 multi-star regions. Ventures’ eighth Contract provides a wrinkle, though: during my game, I drew the “2 colonies on sites with 1 discovery tile” Contract, which solidified my strategic choice: I decide to go after the discovery sites. The sites I target to get the 4th contract are Luhman 16, Alpha Centauri, and 61 Cygni which are all single discovery, multi-star sites. With a little luck there’s a minimum of 8T profit in those three locations!

With the preliminaries out of the way, I take my first action. Since I had the 1st beyond marker I started with a team on Alpha Centauri, and use my first action to explore there, followed by research actions to get more Move and Build cards to take advantage of the New Nomads’ Migrate action. The sequence of actions is important to consider during the competitions first 6 turns: I want to be on the Luhman 16 star track before those 6 cards are finished. This puts me in a relatively good position to kick the competition team out from Luhman 16 before they have a chance to Explore and Build. Luckily, after the first 6 cards the competition kept pulling different sites without their teams, so I was able to Explore and Build at Alpha Centauri and Luhman 16 before they could, sending their team back to the competition team box.

Because the New Nomads start with the Hybrids adaptation card, they can build 2 bases on a single primary site. I tend to put down a Research or Bio Lab as my 2nd base to later remove it as the cost of the Migrate action. This gave me a quick move to 61 Cygni, which the competition hadn’t sent a team to yet. After I explored and built at 61 Cygni, I claimed the 4th Contract.

Now’s a good time to mention the final new feature of Ventures: each HQ has an Alternative Final Profit, and can choose to use it for final scoring instead of scoring for colonies. After the 2nd Starfarers Contract has been fulfilled, you must choose to use either the standard Final Profit or your HQ’s alternate final profit. The New Nomads Alternate Final Profit gives them 2T Profit for each region on the Starfarers board occupied by one of your bases, and an additional 1T for each colony in those regions. When playing solo, I rarely get more than 3 colonies so for my play I needed to evaluate if I could exceed 8T Profit (which is what 3 colonies will yield when using the standard final profit). In my game I decided to go with the New Nomads Alternate Final Profit, hoping to get a few more bases laid down before the end of the era – which I was able to do!

Like I said earlier, in Starfarers time is your enemy. My Alternate Final Profit is in tension with my need to end the Era quickly. To mitigate this tension, I grabbed the colony which gives 1 Profit for every star system without a colony (Papadopoulos); ending early with this colony can give enough Profit to offset what I would gain in future turns, while denying the competition chances to Profit. My strategy to end the game revolves around the Business Display: the competition will almost certainly get contract 5, so I generally try for contracts 1, 3, 4, 6, and if it’s applicable, contract 8. In this game I was able to pull it off and beat the competition! A well earned win.

I have especially enjoyed the increased variation and quality narratives provided by the new solo HQ and competition HQ in Ventures. Like the solo SpaceCorp, each play is different depending on tile draw and card distribution, but in Ventures, each play changes due to the unique abilities of the new player HQs, the different Competition boards and upgraded Competition responses. This all adds more complex play and a richer narrative, making each session a memorable experience. I hope my articles have shed light on some of the possibilities open to you with this incredible expansion. I quite liked SpaceCorp before, now I rate it as one of my favorites!

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Previous Articles:

An Illustrated SpaceCorp: Ventures Solo Session Report: Introduction and Competition HQ

An Illustrated SpaceCorp: Ventures Solo Session Report: The Mariners Era

An Illustrated SpaceCorp: Ventures Solo Session Report: The Planeteers Era