The Alien Technology deck is a fun feature of the Close Encounters expansion that rewards you for colonizing deep space planets by giving you access to unique technological upgrades. You could end up with Cryogenic Stasis Pods that reduce the maintenance costs of your boarding ships and troop transports, or a Microwarp Drive that increases the attack strength of your BC’s. The cards are highly thematic, and work alongside the Empire Advantage deck to diversify each empire.

Because the expansion is modular and the game itself is so easy to modify, you could also use this deck of cards in a couple of other interesting ways. For example, you can deal two or three of these cards to each player at the start of the game, and they get to chose one to keep. If you are playing with the Empire Advantage cards, this gives you a chance to customize your race’s potential path to victory right from the start.

Another modification would be to make barren planets be inhabited by a non-combatant race that is eager to offer up their technology in exchange for your currency. Each time you visit a new (to you) barren planet, the enterprising citizens offer to sell you some of their best pieces of technology in a one-time deal. You draw two cards from the deck, and if you wish to, you may may pay 10 CP to keep one of them. The difference between this and the regular rules is that normally you only get to draw these cards after colonizing/capturing one of these planets, and it only happens once per planet. In this variant, each player can “shop” at each planet once, increasing the number of technology cards in play. Each player can only own a maximum of five technology cards (or any other mutually agreed upon number); if they wish to purchase a new one, they must discard one of the ones they currently have and lose all its benefits. When the deck runs out just reshuffle the discard pile. When playing this way, barren planets cannot be captured or colonized by any player, combat cannot occur in the hex, and ships from different empires may be in the hex at the same time with no effect. If you are worried about balance, you can pre-seed the board with barren planets in even distribution. 

A further variation on the concept above uses an idea that was introduced in the Replicators expansion. That expansion includes a “Galactic Capital” marker that you place in a hex, which all players can then build MS pipelines out to and gain a CP benefit from. You could use that counter instead (or use any other marker, or print out the one below on thick paper) as a “Galactic Trade Center”, where there is a continually rotating selection of new technology cards to purchase. The way this works is you flip five cards face up from the Alien Technology deck and put them in a row where everyone can see them, with the remainder of the deck at one end. These five cards are what is currently for sale in the Trade Center. Players who arrive in this hex with one or more ship of any type can immediately purchase any one of the available cards for 10 CP, replacing the one they take with another from the deck. The trade laws of this establishment tightly regulate foreign transactions, and players must allow two economic phases to pass before making another purchase (track this by putting a mark above the appropriate economic phase column on your production sheet). As in the preceding variant, each player can only own up to five technologies at one time and must discard before purchasing a new one.

Occupancy rules for this Trade Center hex are also the same as mentioned previously (which are the Galactic Capital rules from the Replicators expansion, by the way). After the first card has been purchased from the Trade Center, during each economic phase in which all five cards are the same as in the previous economic phase (no one has bought anything), refresh the available options in the following way: remove the card from the end of the row farthest from the deck, slide the remaining four down, and place a new card face-up next to the deck. This ensures an ever-changing market. Reshuffle the discard pile as needed.

One problem with this Trade Center variant is that every player will know exactly what you are buying, and attentive players may be able to remember your technologies and deduce what kind of ships you are likely to build. Since everyone is at the same disadvantage this really isn’t a strategic problem, but if it bothers your play group you can alleviate it somewhat by taking one face-up card from the row and one blind draw from the deck, choosing which one you want to buy and then discarding the other face down. Draw the blind card first; it is a special offer only to you.

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Trade Center Hex PDF can be found here.