This series of articles will discuss different gameplay aspects of Echo from the Dark, including an introduction to how they work and what makes them unique from previous COIN/ICS games. Each article will also include a short scenario illustrating the concept.

Over on BoardGameGeek, @Konstantin asked a great question:

Usually, in space empire building games planets/provinces/spaces, etc. simply provide a certain fixed number of money/population/resources etc. what you can spend and that’s it. […] Therefore my question: is it different in “Echo from the Dark”? Particularly, do changes in society take place here and if so, how do they contribute to the (in)stability, rise and fall of your empire?”

Sectors in Echo have a “terrain” type that I’ll talk about more later, but in this first article I’ll focus on how I represent the population.

Population in COIN/ICS

The COIN/ICS series already cares deeply about modeling the effects of conflict on a population. From the start of the series in 2012’s Andean Abyss, Volko Ruhnke showed the complexities of a hearts and minds strategy by designing population into the core of the system:

Each space has a population value. This population is worth resources to the various factions but also contributes in different ways to their victory conditions. Insurgent factions often can recruit forces more quickly in higher population spaces, for instance.

Population has an amount of support for, or opposition to, the primary government faction. This is treated as a linear track, from Active Support — where each point of population is worth two points of victory to the government — to Active Opposition. A population that supports the government often prevents insurgents from recruiting there at all.

Population in Echo from the Dark

Echo from the Dark is a game about a vast territory where humanity only occupies a portion at the start of the game. Immediately the design needed the population to be able to grow.

Several COIN games have allowed population values to change before: in Colonial Twilight (Brian Train, 2017) the French government could pull people out of the harder-to-reach deserts and get them into the cities where they were easier to manage. Most recently in Red Dust Rebellion (J Carmichael, 2024), every space on Mars could house new population or lose it when conflict causes damage to the sealed living spaces.

In Echo, each population is its own marker. Sectors near Sol start with some population, but the rest of the map is empty. Population only grows or moves through player actions:

• When you construct your starbases, fleets, and Salt mines, the population grows in that sector. This population is tied to the place more than any particular faction, and so they start independent.
• When you move between sectors, you can also move population friendly to your faction.

Similar to People Power (Kenneth Tee, 2023), each population can individually be independent or friendly to any one of the factions. If you’ve built up a solid base of fanatics in Sol, construction still adds a small independent cohort to the sector that allows other players to recruit.

Shifting that population over to your side happens in two ways:

• As your action, you can use your leaders to Recruit and shift the population further from chaos into alignment with you.
• Periodically — just before gathering income — the faction that controls a sector can also flip an independent population into alignment with them for free.

While it’s helpful to have aligned population for income and keeping other factions away, it’s also important as a way to help a population recover from disaster.

Too much population for what a sector can support will sometimes trigger a disaster, shifting some population away from alignment and towards “chaos” — loosely analogous to Terror or Sabotage in COIN. War, of course, also shifts the population in that direction. Any amount of chaos in a sector prevents everyone from constructing new starbases and fleets and mines, and some factions or technologies also make use of chaos in unique ways. Furthermore, all chaos is periodically removed from the map.

In these ways and others, managing the population is a critical part of every faction’s strategy in Echo from the Dark. What “managing” entails, of course, is different for each.

Scenario: Escape

Tau Ceti here is a star sector with three different factions occupying it. In a normal game it’d have several sectors adjacent, not pictured for this example scenario.

• Green is the Guild of Seekers, a faction that cares about connecting up a trade network with population alignment and starbases and fleets. Here they have two leaders (one exhausted) and several population (one fanatic).
• Blue is the Stellar Empire, a faction that cares about controlling the population, no matter who they’re aligned with — as long as they pay taxes. Here they have a starbase and four fleets.
• Red is the Swords of the Metallic Star, a faction that wants to burn everything down and rebuild it from the ashes. Any sector with a lot of population is ripe for them to come in and light a fire. They have a leader and one fleet.
• There are also three independent population markers in the sector, currently aligned to no player faction.

This round, the green Guild gets to act first. If the red Swords get a chance to start a War, a bunch of this population is going to shift down towards chaos, and the Swords get to choose who — which might mean losing green’s alignment. If the blue Empire gets a chance to construct fleets, they’ll get to count green’s aligned population towards their industrial output — everyone needs to work, after all. Even if neither of these things happen this round, if a star technology comes out of the deck soon and triggers an overpopulation check, the Guild needs to hope the Empire feels benevolent enough to pay for disaster mitigation, as the sector can currently only support a maximum of four population (three intrinsically plus one for the starbase)

Instead, the green Guild decides to make like a tree. With an Explore action, they can choose a few adjacent sectors and move their population (and probably both leaders) out of the danger zone here. They’ve got three population markers: two in that x1 stack, one x2. Only two pop markers or fleets can move between any two sectors, so they’ll have to split them up. Let the Empire and the Swords deal with each other, we’ve got a galaxy to explore!

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