Alrightgames: Anthelion expansions

Anthelion expansions

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Button Shy's 18-card wallet games can be masterclasses in streamlining highly efficient and replayable games. Other times, like this, they simply leave out all the other cards that you'd normally expect to give the game some variety and that would encourage you to play more than a couple of times. I wouldn't have bought the game without the bundled expansion packs, but they gave me reasons to play it for a while before passing it on.

Faction Packs ***

Five small card packs that expand the roster of characters and home worlds with themed attitudes and abilities to add modular variety one game at a time and encourage you to actually play the thing. It would have been more interesting if some of them had been designed to replace the primary factions rather than just the neutral rogue faction each time, but that wouldn't work without some editing. I could throw in everything to make a 10-planet Meganthelion, but I suspect it would be very dull.

Black Hole solo variant ***

This wasn't the most satisfying game to play against myself, but the creator brainstormed a few ideas for solo challenges and I kept being pulled back to this literally unwinnable scenario for its cold simplicity – trying to selectively save as many 'valuable' people as possible before they're swallowed up and sending less fortunate souls down its maw for bonuses.