Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." – Antoine de Saint-Exupery These guys are mostly 'non-gamers' who I have in the past convinced to play games as difficult as Food Chain Magnate, Brass Birmingham, Pax Pamir etc. I have only one player who I don't think understands most of the games we play, but he seems to enjoy the time anyway, somehow! Inspired by 7 Wonders, I decided to use seating position as a placeholder for map position. Military and Nomad fleets moved around the board from one seat to the next. Colonies pointed some number of seats right or left to open a trade link. The Kt'Zr'Kt'Rtl had an easier time trading with people who were farther from them, and their fleets moved 2-3 seats at a time, but not one. I tore out the old multi-step combat system and introduced a single-step combat system that was more flavorful and involved custom dice. The final phase of play is the Confluence phase. During this phase, the great races come together and will first bid on colony planets and research projects that will add to new tech being developed. First, any player that managed to research tech during their turn, will then announce to the other players that this tech has been shared. When a player researches a project during the trade phase, they will immediately gain access to the tech and gain one or more victory points. Now, all other players gain the tech and can use it next round to run even more conversions, or possible to upgrade one of their existing technology cards. Each tech card also provides the sharing bonus which is 6 points for the first 2 rounds and will be only 1 point in the final round. In the history of economics Adam Smith titled his opus “The Wealth of Nations” because he was actually trying to answer the question of what made nations wealthy. The prevailing idea at the time, mercantilism, focused on large-scale domestic production and trying to export more than you import. Seizing land to increase that production was also a priority. Smith demonstrated that trade itself was beneficial to both sides and that specialization and trade generated wealth.

Complex trades with simple notation– each converter tells you the approximate value of both inputs and products, helping you negotiate fair trades Each round starts with open trading. Players begin with a smattering of resources and cards representing planets and research teams that produce resources and develop technologies respectively, as well as a unique selection of converter cards, machines that input resources and output more in quantity and/or quality. From there, things have moved beyond me. The game was manufactured in China (I helped with color proofs during the Gathering in 2017), demonstrated at the 2017 Origins Game Fair (I very much enjoyed showing it off), and should be on the market within a week of this writing. What makes Sidereal Confluence unique is emblazoned in the title of the game – trading and negotiation. Though it may seem like the gameplay is about maximizing your engine, the real core of the game is about how well you can negotiate with your opponents. The box art doesn’t make it jump off my shelf Gameplay Overview The actual process of developing a game for printing is involved, but most of the work was done by people other than me. Unfortunately I used CorelDRAW to do all of my design work, which is incompatible with the Adobe industry standards, so the graphic designer had to create everything from scratch. Added to that, there's no standard form factor in any of the cards, so most of the techniques to reduce the graphic designer's workload simply don't apply to Sidereal Confluence. That is something I'm going to have to fix before I get another game published...Almost everything is tradeable– Not just your resources! Planets, ships, technology, future production and more. It’s possible to play through Sidereal Confluence and never trade. You’d lose, but nothing in the rules forces you to trade. You do trade, of course, because you’ve got some useless cubes but the person across the table has the cubes you need for your machines. Trading is the mechanism by which you get what you want. In the real world we mostly trade with money as a medium of exchange, but Sidereal Confluence has a small enough economy to function on a barter system.

It goes to show how desperate this genre of gaming is that there’s basically two titles known for fantastic negotiation and trading, but it's undeniable that Sidereal Confluence takes the core elements of Chinatown and propels them to insane interstellar proportions. Finally, I shortened the game by removing the first four-and-a-half turns! Every player now starts with a pile of resources, representing what they could have produced over that time. This avoids new players making a mistake on their first or second turn and costing themselves the game before they have a chance to understand what they are doing. It also — finally — brought the game down to a little over two hours. Each alien race also offers unique twists on the game’s fundamental mechanics, from the Kjas empire tiles letting them build a self-sustaining economy fuelled on planets, to the Faderan “Relic Worlds,” a tabletop slot machine of random benefits that can impact the entire table. Every race warps the game in a different way, with the harder races to play requiring better communication and negotiation skills to take full advantage of their powers.Sidereal Confluence is one of my favorite games released in the last few years. The gameplay is so simple, yet deep and interesting. So many modern board games are designed to pit opponents against each other in a battle of wits. Sidereal Confluence does this in a purer way than nearly any other game I’ve seen – by forcing players to use their skills in communication to out play each other. The negotiation feels more primal and instinctual than a drawn out series of well-planned actions in a game like The Great Zimbabwe or Great Western Trail. Almost everything is tradeable - Not just your resources! Planets, ships, technology, future production and more. due to being too close to its star.I didn't know, and my friends were skeptical, so I forked the project. The old combat and position version was named "Pegasid", and the new stripped down version became "Cthonian". I'm an introvert. Introducing myself to new people makes me extremely uncomfortable. Convincing people I don't know that they should look at a game I've designed makes me want to crawl into a corner and hide. The Gathering is a very large crowd, and at the time I knew almost no one there.

Unity copy of Clinical Immortality since it also has the property of having a Hamming distance of four The ultimate goal is victory points, which are acquired by researching technologies, using your economy to convert resources to goods, and converting your leftover goods into points at the end of the game. That left me thinking: This was a game that could support something as outlandish as a player floating a currency during play. I wanted to share this not just with my friends, but with everyone. But how could I deal with the insane length of the game? For a game inundated with components, the core mechanic is brain shatteringly pure. Players will only win if they’re able to score the most points, which are best earned through developing technologies. However, this tech costs a lot of resources to produce, basically trading power for points. You have to look for gaps in the market, find out what’s most in demand that you can exploit for leverage over other players. Sometimes a return to the fundamentals refreshes curiosity and realigns the mind. This series on the way games illustrate basic economic principles will not be anything new to people who remember Econ 101, but I hope you’ll find it interesting regardless.

Finally, the game round ends with players sharing technologies so everyone has access to any newly developed tech, followed by bidding from a selection of new planets and research teams. Sidereal Confluence: Remastered, was released, I believe, this year from Wizkids and as the title says, featured a new layout, some artwork a few other small, but nice touches. SD is a negotiation game with a science fiction theme and some auction/bidding and engine building mechanics, for 4-9 players. SD was designed by TauCeti Deichmann, and featuring art by Kwanchai Moriya, Jesse Seidule, Nakarin Sukontakorn. I was a sophomore in college and ACiv had been out for a decade, which gives a sense of its staying power. For those unfamiliar with it, ACiv is an eight-hour, 3-8 player trading game with a disaster management game wrapped around it and a huge heaping of history wrapped around that. This extra year included a slew of minor refinements: balance tweaks to the Unity and Eni Et, plus lots of graphical improvements. To streamline thinking about the game, I added text under each converter telling the player how valuable it is to run, and the lower-right corner of each card now showed the benefits gained from flipping that card. A "donation good" box was added to the player aid to make it more obvious which resources needed to be traded or given away. Its title may sound like some sort of embarrassing medical condition, but Sidereal Confluence is actually a game of deep-space diplomacy where starfaring species vie to become the dominant faction in a cut-throat cosmos. While that’s hardly a novel concept, the game combines free-wheeling negotiation with complex economic strategy in some intriguing ways.

The game took four hours to play, far too long to show publishers. Still, when I got an invite to Alan Moon's Gathering of Friends, I brought a copy along to show anyone who was curious. Complex trades with simple notation - each converter tells you the approximate value of both inputs and products, helping you negotiate fair trades In a nutshell, it's a trading game that allows extremely open and flexible deal making. It is also quite asymmetric what with all of the weird aliens; I like aliens. This is the story behind that game. Sidereal Confluence: Remastered Edition Sidereal Confluence: Remastered Edition WizKids Remaster trading and negotiation in the Elysian quadrantThe final economic principle I’d like to highlight is the importance of trust and transparency in market activity. A lot of the challenging policy questions in economic matters revolve around this issue. In Sidereal Confluence it’s simply baked into the rules: you’ve got to honor the trades (even future promises) you make. In real life, places that have legal and/or community structures that facilitate trust in market activity work best.