Clemmensen

This game looked so great and was such a disappointment. Every ship has a great background story, that just boosts your imagination and makes you want to explore the space around you. Then you play the game and finds out that the story on the ship cards, where the best thing about this game.

The game components are excellent with painted minis and metal coins, but the gameplay are dull and uninspiring.

Yes, you can choose your own “destiny”, but trading between two planets is the way to win this game. Trying to take out another players ship is too hard and mining is not worth the risk. Both takes to long and you risk getting destroyed yourself. The sheer amount of time you spend chasing an opponent is way high, compared to the benefits. The game also have both missions and special awards for doing certain things and while these are great thematically, again they are not worth the time.

So, find a nice trade route, buy a good shield and an engine and you will win the game, while the other opponents is trying out all the “fun” stuff like being a pirate, realising too late that it was a bad choice.

The rulebook in my opinion, is not very clear on important aspects like on which space you can mine or not. Everything is based on dice rolls, which for me is okay, but if you do not like dice, avoid this game at all cost.

The game would be better if prices and availability for goods changed over the course of the game and if mining or going through “difficult terrain” could be made easier by buying special equipment. The combat rules could use an update too.

So all in all, this was nowhere like the sandbox space adventure I had hoped for. The game was to long, too unbalanced and to boring in the end, that all the guys in my gaming group decided to put Xia back on the shelves, never to be played again, even after 3 playthroughs.

I’m so sad about this. Xia had so much potential..

If you would like to play this, or the other games in the series, thinking it’s like “Descent: Journeys into the dark”, then you are going to be dissapointed.

Make no mistake: This game is great! But even if it seem like a Dungeon Crawl, it is more like a Tactical Co-op game. If you are expecting it to be such a game, then you are in for a treat.

This game is about survival. The idea behind spawning monsters in the end of your round and activating them after you move, makes the challenge of placing the heroes critical. A lot of interesting tactical solutions can be made, where each hero and their abilities are important. The missions will get harder, but clever play and good planing, can make the day.

The monsters are quite diverse and the ability to combine all of the games in the series, interchanging both characters and monsters alike, makes the replay value even greater.

So my advice is this: Think of this game as a challenging tactical co-op game and not a dungeon crawl, then you will have a great game in your hands.

PROS: The “Adrenaline System”, that gives the Overseer more or fewer actions, depending on the players willingness to push themselves, is great!

The Elite soldiers are very unique and add different tactical descisions to the players according to who you choose to be part of the team. Each soldier has 8 special “kit cards” and a handful of generic ones, to customize them even further for each mission. A sentry bot is also included as “specialization”.

The game is very balanced. If you make bad tactical descisions the other side will benefit from your mistake, but not punish you.

Privateer Press has made a great tutorial video (about 17 minutes) which explains the rules thoroughly, which can be found on their website or youtube.

CONS: The miniatures are nice, but “soft”. The quality could have been better.

The map tiles, although cool, is not “fastened” to each other, which makes it easy to “destroy” the map. This is due to the flexibility in the different map layouts and in that way it do make sense, but it is a bit fiddly.