Hello fellow gamers!
The Ancient Mediterranean Seas! An epoch full of myths. Endless coasts to be discovered and conquered. But the ancient empires were also Empires of trade and commerce in search of rare goods and grain to feed their people at home. Here it is: The game series that covers this fascinating era. Move your armies and ships over a vast map and lead your empire to the Golden Age.
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Expansions and Kickstarter Early Bird
Here is the story about the expansions for the game series.
Many designers put everything they have in their creative mind into a game. The intention is good. You will find a lot of extras, chrome and fancy stuff. That is nice but the game can be quickly overloaded.
We focus on these two aspects in the design: Decision taking and effectiveness. The games of the series are not easy to win. You need to time the execution of your actions very well and you need to have the right tactics within the action cycles and a strategy from the beginning. Analyze the map as well as the Development Chart and decide what to do step by step. Don’t loose patience. Don’t waste actions.
Once you played a couple of games of the series you might want more variety. That’s where we jump in with great expansions for the game series without adding much complexity.
In the “Early Bird pledge” in the Kickstarter campaign you will receive two expansions for free: “New Markets” and the “Heroes & Event” cards.
“New Markets” includes tokens with “Merchandise”. These are distributed randomly on the map. The mix of merchandise is slightly different than what the factions have on the maps at the beginning of a game. So, there could be more “Gold” to be found, but less “Grain”. In an advanced option these “Merchandise” tokens are placed face down. So, you don’t even know what kind of merchandise you get when arriving at a faraway coast that you are exploring in order to expand your trading net.
This expansion will make no game the same. There is an endless variety of options and new strategies to follow. We like this way of creating randomness.
A little expansion that adds more randomness and interactivity are the “Event & Hero” cards. They are played like “instants” in MTG and add nice effects during the action cycle.
During testing and developing the series we had a lot of discussions about the level of randomness the game of the series should have. We decided to keep it at a minimum and developed the slogan “the biggest randomness factor is not knowing the plans of your opponents!”. We are very happy with that. But then again, there are many players who want more randomness, who love to roll dice, who love to have cards in their hand and wait for the right moment to play these cards that have immediate effects on their opponents. We didn’t want to exclude this aspect of gaming for all those who love it. And for those who don’t like the predictability of the combat resolution, we offer a dice-based combat resolution for free as a download from our website for owners of the game.
The expansion “Pirates & Barbarians” adds another great element to the series. A player may decide to activate pirates and barbarians that enter the map. A player might have suddenly a threat in a spot of the map he didn’t expect. Pirates and Barbarians don’t negotiate, they plunder. The little issue with these gentlemen is, once on the map, they can be activated by each player. And you don’t know if these forces you called to be a goad for one of your opponents, will turn against you later.
Last but not least we have the expansion “New Armies”. This expansion will take the warfare aspect on a new level. Many of you might know the species of “Block Games”. With this expansion forces are hidden and there is more deepness is combat and leading campaigns.
We hope that the concept of the series will be well received in the gaming world. We are playing and testing right now a couple of scenarios and a version that carries the game system into Gaul. Caesar tries to conquer Gaul while the Belgian and Germanic tribes need to decide with whom to ally. This game brings the asymmetry of the series to a new level.
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Take care and thanks for your interest in our games! See you in the next blog post,
your Uwe Walentin.
The “History of the Ancient Seas” Kickstarter campaign was successfully funded!
