Andromeda’s Edge

In Andromeda’s Edge the players are lone factions escaping the oppression of their own homeworlds, and looking to establish a new civilisation in the Andromeda galaxy. Rather than combine and collaborate on this venture, however, we are following the hallowed human traditions of competition.

The board is broken into two parts. The lower section is the Andromeda galaxy, to where we will launch spaceships, populate moons and establish developments. The upper half shows five tracks which you hope to move up during play, as they represent your civilisation’s advances thematically – and literally, as you’ll score points for each one.

The game’s basic rhythm is your choosing from one of two options each turn: launching a ship from your personal Station board, or returning all your ships home again. Launching is what you’ll be doing most: sending a ship out onto the main board to one of the regions (tiles). If you’ve no ships out on the board, the ‘first’ launch must go to an unoccupied region. If you do, you have a little more flexibility; placing the newly-launched ship adjacent – or within its movement distance – to one of your other ships. Once placed, you take the action on the region tile. Planet locations allow you to claim a moon – we’ll come back to moons shortly – and Base locations give you an action to take. There are five such actions: buying modules – we’ll come back to modules too! – repairing damaged ships, trading to convert resources, or drawing tactics cards, which can be played on or sometimes off your turn, giving you surprise advantages in trade, movement, combat and so on. The last action is building a Development, which is thematically kind of a flag in the ground to reflect your growing status in the galaxy, and literally an avenue to some juicy hauls of points.

If your turn ends with you sharing a tile with any opponent player, or one of the games’ own automated bad guys, that will trigger combat. We won’t go into it in depth here, but suffice to say more or better ships are helpful, winning is advantageous, but losing is not generally catastrophic, as the game encourages combat so has taken the decision not to be punitive about failing at it.

If you return to station instead of launching, then each ship is used as a kind of power source to generate the above-mentioned resources. This is where the moons and modules come in, as both contribute to this resource-generation move becoming more and more powerful, furnishing you with more and more rewards as the game continues.

Various actions on the tiles and certain junctures on the tracks have the Event symbol on them, which serves as a kind of ticking clock, as players triggering a certain number of them will also trigger an actual event: scoring one of the tracks and heralding the arrival of another one of the game’s baddies, who will engage players in combat if they can.

Players can agree how many points will trigger the final round (we’ve played 50)  and then there’s some final scoring across a few different categories – but tracks are very important – before the player with the most points is announced Lord of Andromeda, God of the Galaxy, Duke of Dice (or their preferred title)