Nearly every action requires you to spend focus, so one of your dice - sorry, cubes - gets rotated down. Most of the time they’re rotated instead.
Nearly everything revolves around your explorer’s three focus cubes, the things that look like dice but which the rulebook assures you are absolutely not dice, apart from the odd occasion when the game asks you to roll them. As a game, it’s easier to learn than your average Star Trek’s science is to follow. There are plenty of symbols and words to learn and keep straight, but the jargon is mostly in-universe, the stuff that arises once you step out of the shuttle and start walking around. Even a bigger surprise that it’s this smooth. It’s a surprise that Unsettled is playable. Weird verbs? Nouns without meaning? Gibberish adjectives? Unsettled’s got ’em. Certainly no smashing of anything that might be sentient. Point is, we solved the problem with plenty of derring-do and know-how, but almost no smashing. Smashing a fossil to extract its data to afford a launch into an adjacent space. Drinking behemoth secretions to heal our distressed crewmate. Darting in and out of the storm behind the shield of LUNA’s shield bubble. In our case, that meant putting everything we’d discovered into action. Or at least to assess whether you can.Īnd when you can’t, like I did when a trio of towering behemoths marched out of the storm and positioned themselves between my crew and our shuttle, you find a solution that doesn’t involve napalm, combat lasers, or anything more violent than running a few samples through a science thingamajig. Whether you’re measuring its parameters, channeling energy straight from its turbulence, or recovering items tossed to and fro by its passage, to explore Grakkis isn’t simply to avoid its dangers. That’s why each of Grakkis’s three scenarios sends you straight into the heart of the storm. Here, because the storm is a part of Grakkis, it’s as worthy of discovery as anything else you might stumble across. Like I was saying, most games would portray a planet-spanning storm as something to avoid. Even if the applications aren’t immediately apparent. Whatever it’s for, it will likely be useful. Maybe you can use it to overclock LUNA, your handy drone. Now that you’ve picked up that object, you flip a card and put them together. Think experience points for that last thing. Maybe this requires something special - some energy, perhaps, a scoop of resources, a comprehension disc. Discovering something means you’ve walked to its location and picked it up. This, too, is a procedure you’ll likely find familiar. The storm is as much a part of Grakkis as the flora and fauna you spend time gathering and testing. Most board games would have you avoid the storm. I definitely don’t mean “bad.” Just most of the time. When you find yourself inside of the storm, things get… testy.
At any given time your character is either grounded or elevated. To explore Grakkis is to carefully pick across broken terrain depicted not only by the location cards on your table, but also your vertical position on a separate card. The defining feature of the Grakkan biosphere is a massive storm that sweeps across the entire planetary surface, sometimes sticking to high altitudes and sometimes descending into the canyons to inflict “distress” cards on your unlucky explorers. My crew was stranded on Grakkis, a desert planet that is totally, 100%, certifiably not Arrakis. Let me tell you a story about the moment Unsettled clicked.
0 kommentar(er)
