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A couple of years ago I backed a kickstarter being done locally called Vertium: Shadow of the Complex. I think I received the game last year, and I've played it maybe five times? It's not a great game. It has some really neat ideas, but it really doesn't achieve anything that people can pick up and play. But I feel like there's an interesting game to be played with the components.

The Game

It's for 1-4 players, and each player gets a mat, and number of meeples (depending on the number of players; more players means more meeples), and four of 4 different kinds of colonization tokens (CTs). You have a number of planets, depending on the number of players (more players, more planets). Each planet has four places for CTs, and an orange moon. There's three blue moons randomly distributed to planets. There's three decks of cards: 78 resource cards, a deck of cards to assist in the dice-oriented second phase, and a deck of small bonus cards. Each player gets a bonus card.

There trouble starts with the game being divided into two phases, Phase 1 and Phase 2. Phase 1 is where the players attempt to settle the planets by drawing resource cards, spending them on CTs (3 resources cards makes a CT), and some resource cards let you play silly buggers like removing CTs, or causing a player to miss a turn or two. Once a planet is settled, you place a meeple on it, flip over its orange moon and add that number of vertium tokens to it. The moon also started orbiting when the planet's owner takes a turn, big moons (3 or more) orbiting at 1/8 orbit per turn, and little moons (3 or less) at 1/4 orbit per turn. Each full orbit adds more vertium. Once all the planets are colonized, the blue moons are flipped (one removes half the vertium on the planet, another lets a meeple escape to it, and the third adds a vertium token to your planet's collection). The resource cards are put away, and the other, combat-oriented deck is broken out. Players add up their scores, and the player with the highest score also gets the first turn and players take turns in that order for Phase 2.

Phase 2 is essentially Risk, except you can attack any planet with the resources from any planet, there's 3 rounds, and each player can conduct an attack that round. You take a meeple and as much vertium as you want, swapping one for another meeple to leave on your planet, and go roll dice at another planet. The player with a surviving meeple takes the planet and earns a vertium token. The combat-oriented cards are essentially a way of fixing dice results in your favour.

The final scoring is the amount of planets you control and the amount of vertium and meeples you have.

Things I like:

Planets. The art on them is lovely, and they're round. They're potentially handy just to own if you're a Battlefleet Gothic fanatic.

Moons. The way the moons orbit them is kind of labour-intensive, but I dig how it's clockwork like that.

Art. It's quite lovely and it has a cool pulp-adventure vibe.

Things I don't like:

The player mats. They do nothing except support some admittedly pretty art. They have little squares for all your meeples, and areas to put your colonization tokens. These could also be heaped in front of the players, though.

The two phases, having players play two games, one to see who starts with the advantage in the second is especially bizarre because being able to attack first is an asset. That they don't use all of the components irritates me from a product design perspective. I feel like if the two phases are blended together then the game should be much better.

The rulebook. It's awful, particularly if you haven't played in a while or haven't played before, and in my opinion as a technical writer does everything wrong. I would hand it out to students getting their tech.writing certification as an exercise in how-not-to-do-it, and require them to re-write it as a two-page pamphlet.

Next Steps
Using the components in the box, and disregarding the rulebook, I want to rebuild this as an appealing, fun game. I'll use this thread to do so, and maybe people will have useful comments and feedback to add.

In case you want a copy, go to:

https://www.capergames.ca/

Huh, sounds like an interesting challenge.

Here's what the game looks like very early in Phase 1:

So I've been thinking about why there might be phases and a couple of things spring to mind. Firstly, without all the planets solidly colonized, the issue of one player having more planets colonized (and hence has a solid advantage in material) becomes more pronounced (now they have a time advantage because now they're accruing more material. Also, how it works that they invade unoccupied or uncolonized planets I don't know (yet).

Phase 1 is pretty procedural though, and I should have a look at the 1-player rules, as I suspect there isn't much difference in the first phase between one player seeing how many players the luck of the draw will assign them, and 2+ players.

My current thought it that if you just take out the Phase 1/Phase 2 thing as the rules stand, without taking anything else out, then there's an issue of one player being randomly assigned an advantage, and the other player(s) playing at a comparative disadvantage with no particular agency on any player's part.

The game is designed to scale though, with more players adding proportionately more planets and orange moons (the ones that rotate and provide vertium, somehow), and with that thought I figured maybe if each player just gets to occupy one planet at the beginning of the game with a meeple, and then start earning vertium.

Which means that there's going to be two resources that the players are earning, the resource cards, and the vertium tokens. Now this is back to Risk, where you can earn extra dudes by occupying continents, as well as drawing cards to cash in for... more dudes. Except in Vertium the cards cash in for colonization tokens, and then those take undefended areas.

Phase one is something of a more traditional worker-placement game, while Phase two is more area-control, and I kinda like the idea that players can keep putting CTs on planets to build them up as valuable. Particularly where there's variation in the vertium income that planets can provide.

Given that players can shift and conquer planets from the start, what I think I would do is detach the part of filling a planet's CT quota to gain control (and a Meeple and vertium, and starting the clock on gaining more vertium) and simply have colonization tokens affect how much vertium a planet gives its occupier.

So peg the ability of a Meeple to move to occupy a planet at one (1) vertium token, so players starting on a lousy planet can move to another player in the hope of finding somewhere more productive. Have vertium be the resources players spend to produce meeples as well, though at what ratio?

Where a planet has complete set of colonization tokens, it does the usual and has both a cache of vertium equal to the amount on the moon, and produces vertium at each orbit of its moon (keeping the big moon/small moon distinction in speed of orbiting). This is independent of whether the planet is occupied. Excess colonization tokens can be placed on the planet, with each complete set adding +1 to the amount the moon seeds upon completing an orbit.

The new turn sequence would be:

1. Draw two cards from the Resource deck
2. Spend resource cards on colonization tokens (some resource cards enable hijinks too, like stealing tokens,etc).
3. Orbit the moon (1/4 or 1/8 depending on size) of any fully colonized planets
4. Collect any vertium produced by moon orbiting occupied planets
5. Spend vertium to produce more meeples, or to fuel an attack on another planet.

Attacking another player is again rolling the dice and spending cards from the attacking deck. Vertium can be spent to protect the attackers (fortunately the shield results on the dice are also green), and attackers can spend 1 vertium to cease the attack and return to their origin planet. Players can also attack and occupy unoccupied planets, and spend 1 vertium to move supplies of vertium around their occupied planets.

I want to say the end-game state is when one player loses all their meeples, but that's not a great flavour of end-game.

Okay, so I had some further discussion of the design with my offspring/developer/play-tester and it seemed like a good idea to give players something else to do with their resource cards, noting that these resources are:

Livestock (green)
Water (blue)
Chemical (yellow)
Nuclear (red)

Notably the dice used in combat have three results: a red cross-hair, a yellow cross-hair, and a green triangle. Usually that is a red cross hair = 1 attack removing one meeple or vertium, yellow cross-hair is = 1/2 attack, so 2 removes one meeple or vertium, with greens cancelling incoming attacks.

I thought, the colours of resources fit that, so that vertium can be used to fuel shields, cancelling attacks so that meeples survive, until you don't have any vertium left. The nuclear resource cards are red, and the chemical resource cards are yellow, and players could likewise cash these out of their hands when attacking another planet.

End-game-wise, I think it's probably a good idea to have it scale to the number of players so that it's something like the game ends when a player has captured a number of planets equal to the number of players plus one.

I'm fiddling with this again as I had another, regular game of Vertium and with all the neat widgets and whatnot I'm sure there's a better game in there.

I've also noticed that the colour scheme in the game corresponds reasonably well to the colour scheme used on the dice in the 2nd phase of the regular game: red, green, and yellow. There's not only green Vertium gem-markers, but yellow gem-markers for one of the expansions. I feel like these should be related somehow. They also correspond reasonably well with the red, yellow, blue, and green colonization tokens.

Right now I think setting up the planets and moons as usual, and having planets each place a meeple on a single planet to extract resources and expand is the way to go.

Players draw resource cards, turn these into resource tokens (green, yellow, maybe add blue and red into the mix somehow), or colonization tokens (green, yellow, blue, red). The colonization tokens would enable a planet to produce more meeples, while the resource tokens would allow those meeples to spread to new planets, and perhaps aid invasions somehow.

Actually, now that I think about it, maybe that's why in the regular game Meeples take a stock of vertium tokens with them to invade, and those vertium tokens are discarded due to hits until just the meeple is left. I think maybe adding in the yellow tokens to enhance yellow results on the dice might also be good.