Chapter 3 - Command Tokens and Race Sheet

Today we're going to talk about the alien races, and how they interact with the board.

There are 17 races in this game!

Each race has a Race Sheet.  This is the front of the Sardakk N'orr's sheet:

The game recommends that for our first game, we start with these six races:

- Sardakk N'orr
- The Xxcha Kingdom
- The Universities of Jol-Nar
- The Federation of Sol
- The Emirates of Hacan
- The Barony of Letnev

So, that's what we'll do.

I've emailed everyone in the group high-rez scans of these 6 races.

The front of the sheet illustrates each race's special abilities, commodities, and unit attributes.

The back of the sheet provides some back story on your race, as well as what technologies and units they start the game with.

In the interest of keeping things simple, I'm going to randomly assign one of these races to each player.  I'll notify the group on the outcome a couple weeks before game day.

Race Sheet: Unit Attributes

You'll notice that each unit on your race sheet has a few pieces of information:

- Cost: The amount of Production it costs to build this unit

- Combat: In battle, you roll a d10.  When the Destroyer attacks, a roll of 9 or higher hits.

Note the + symbol below the Combat icon.  this denotes the Sardak Norr's special racial abilty, "+1 to all combat rolls". 

- Move:  How many hexes it can move in a turn.

- Anti-Fighter Barrage.  Many units have special abilities.  We'll go over them in more depth later.  Note that special abilities are not considered "combat rolls", thus are unaffected by the Sardak Norr's bonus.

- Upgrade:  By using the Technology strategy card, you can spend 2 red technology to upgrade your Destroyer I into Destroyer II units (more details later).

Also note the little triangle next to the 9 in Combat.  This marker indicates that this stat improves when the unit is upgraded.

We'll discuss units in greater detail later, but since they take up so much real estate on the race sheet, I wanted to give a cursory overview.

Command Tokens

Command Tokens (formerly "Command Counters" in third edition) are the primary resource your race uses to interface with the board.

They are two-sided:  The top shows your race's logo, the bottom shows a silhouette of a ship.

Command Tokens are stored on your race's Command Sheet among one of three pools:

- Tactic

- Fleet

- Strategy

You begin the game with 3 tokens in your Tactic and Fleet pool, and 2 in your Strategy pool.

You will spend these tokens throughout the game to perform various actions.  You recover 2 tokens per turn, and there's a point during the game in which you're allowed to shift your tokens between the three pools.

What they do:

- Tactic:  You spend a token from your Tactic Pool to place it on a hex on the game board to perform a Tactical Action on that space (more detail on this action later).

- Fleet:  You cannot have more ships in any one system (hex) than you have tokens in your fleet pool.  If you exceed this limit, you must sacrifice ships in your system until you satisfy this limitation.  The tokens in this pool are kept "silhouette" side up.

Note:  Fighters (the small cannon-fodder ship of the game) are excepted from this limit.

- Strategy:  You spend tokens from this pool to activate the secondary ability on most strategy cards (again, more detail on this later).

For now, I'd say feel free to look over the scans I sent you at your leisure.  Questions are, as always, welcome.  More details over the coming weeks!