Importantly too the information contained in a hex is crucial, but not as crucial as what it implies. Population will be moved around with suitable ships, or sometimes just directly if the right upgrades are available. Ships will gain or shed damage tokens, or move around the board at varying speeds and in different directions. As planets have their resources extracted, the dice will be rotated to show how much is left. You’d know how much population but not their allegiance.Īll of this information too changes regularly. Some of this information is available through touch, but at best only presence – you’d know what ships were there but not their owners. That’s one single hex, and a game may involve dozens of them depending on player count. Ships will carry with them damage markers.
Hexes will sometimes include centurion markers of varying strength. There is more too – population cubes will gradually make their way onto these worlds to show ownership and control. Look at the amount of information contained on a hex:
#Planet centauri console commands full
Consider the image below, which shows a small subset of a full hex map of the game. It’s a significant issue in two player games and makes the game, in my estimation, all but completely unplayable at the full player count or close to it. This is a hugely difficult category for Exodus: Proxima Centauri. Otherwise, the requirement of perceiving ownership of ships is going to be massively problematic. We’ll very tentatively recommend Exodus in this category provided only one type of colour blindness must be supported and at a lower player count than the full six. This though is the only place in the game where colour is likely to be a deal-breaking issue since all other game components have art, iconography, descriptions or combinations thereof that permit them to be identified. ‘Say, who owns that unaccompanied carrier next to my armada’ is a question that is unlikely to calm anyone’s paranoia. Inquiring of ownership of pieces is not only likely to leak gameplay intention, it will likely change the overall level of tension around the table. Replacement pieces are not feasible given the relationship of piece to player board and technology profiles. There aren’t many compensatory strategies in the event either of those things aren’t true. The best that can be said is that if there is only one kind of colour blindness around the table, and there is a lower player count than six, it’ll likely be possible to pick a combination of colours that minimises problems. A pair of fighters has a level of menace that is modulated by the owner’s aggression and the technology they have allocated to ships of that type. The danger or otherwise posed by ships in nearby hexes is something that is specific to individual players.
The problem here is that knowing who owns which ships is absolutely critical – this isn’t just an inconvenience, it’s something that will completely undermine a player’s ability to make meaningful decisions. Protanopes will find the blue and purple difficult to tell apart. Deuteranopes will have a reasonably okay time with this, but both Protanopes and Tritanopes will experience colour clashes. Exodus supports up to six players and makes use of a palette of white, red, green, purple, yellow and blue. Predictably, colour blindness is a problem. Let’s not pre-judge the results – let’s delve into the darker corners of the Exodus universe and see what the research shows. Even now though, with almost 200 games in the bank, I’m still as surprised as anyone by what a teardown shows. We gave it four and a half stars in our review.Ī game like this though is larger than life, and the sheer number of moving parts make it unlikely to get good grades in its accessibility teardown. It’s a beefy game, with complicated rules and a lengthy playtime – but in comparison to other games of a similar kidney (Twilight Imperium in particular) it is a much more realistic prospect for a game day. Exodus: Proxima Centauri has broken a stream of subdued praise by virtue of being a genuinely superb game of space exploration and conquest. It’s been a while since we’ve covered a really excellent game on the blog.