Heng’s Gaming Blog

Am now switching to a new address:

http://aikyong.com

All my posts from friendster and blogger have been transfered and am now in process of customising the look. For the moment it’s pretty much up and running.

This past weekend just did a trek to Gunung Irau, the famed "green mossy forest trail" in Cameron Highlands.

A rather tough trek, the whole journey took a total of 10 hours, from 9.30am in the morning to 7.30pm in the evening.

We had checked in the dorm the night before at the Malaysian Nature Society’s cosy abode in the middle of the Boh Tea Plantation.

The next morning, we started with a drive up Gunung Brinchang. There we met our first obstacle with the cars having difficulty going up the steep uneven road:

With some hassle, we managed to get moving and then proceeded into the forest.

Some truly unique sight found in certain parts of the world can be seen here in Cameron Highlands, Malaysia: The moss-covered forest.

Plenty of steep slopes to challenge the trekkers’ physical endurance.

Lots of large rainforest tree trunks to step around/clamber on.

G. Irau Jungle trek:- total 2.35km one way.

As we climb on, we find ourselves surrounded by mists/fog/cloud.

It’s peaceful here.

Jungle walk no#14. It takes 30mins just to do 0.4km.

Darling Li Li during one of the rest breaks. We were given various biscuits and chocolates for consumption during breaks to keep our energy up.

More steep slopes and tree roots. Some tree roots need to be passed underneath.

As we go deeper into the forest, the moss starts to become thicker and more dense.

Unlike other mountain treks, there is a strong emphasis on using hands to grab tree branches/roots to hoist oneself up the path, or to let oneself down.

There are moss covered trees all around. The ground however is muddy like heck.

This sign here had suffered some sort of burn.

The cloud obscures the view of the sky and the mountain side.

A typical path, roots below, branches above. Sorta like a tunnel.

Some eerie tree formation with cavities between the trunk-roots.

Trees covering the path.

Another weird formation:- a tree stump sticking out from the ground, covered with moss and seaweed-like-coral-kinda greenies.

Nearing our destination.

Some places required climbing over rocks… ouch, sharp! bring your gloves!

Another green tunnel, moss-covered branches above, tree roots below.

We’re here! The peak’s a little underwhelming. Not much of a view, it serves rather as a sort of marker signifying the limit of the climb. The journey’s more interesting.

A typical participant’s shoes when reaching the peak. Three words: MUD! MUDDY! MUDDIER!

(Bubbles: hhmmm… did someone say MUD?! I am a pig, I heart MUD!)

Going back is faster since everyone did not stop for photos anymore. Overall still ~9 hours climb though.

Verdict: The green moss-covered forest is special and the best part only comes near the end, so no skipping the rough and long climb early on. The green moss-carpet has been destroyed by constant trampling by too-many tourists. The last part of the trail is the portion still in the better condition because presumably less people made it that far. Bearing this in mind, there’s another trail I recommend to see the moss-carpet which me and my ex-schoolmates encountered. It is near G. Beremban at Tanah Rata. It has less moss-covered trees, but more moss-covered ground.

Last
night’s session was a rousing success, guanranteed by
Boardgamecafe.net’s three stooges: namely Jedi Council jack208, Jedi
Knight ayheng and Jedi Padawan-Knight-to-be-coming-soon lostboyz.

The
session was dealt a terrible blow early on as people started dropping
out like flies and ayheng was delayed by urgent work. lostboyz and
jack208 soldiered on at 8pm at OTK with a starting meal.

9pm and
an urgent message was sent out: where are you? ayheng finally made it
to OTK and the three power figures started discussing the serious
business of the (boardgaming) FORCE. (yeah well, we talked mostly about
upcoming and favourite releases while I ate my curry chicken rice
dinner).

10pm thereabouts we adjourned to OTK and enticed laiwah to a game of Formula DE!

This fun racing game uses dice in a creative way, namely, you get a
progressively better dice with higher numbers as you shift gears up,
until you are in a lean-mean-unstoppable racing machine flying down the
straight at gear 5!

gear 1 - yellow, gear 2 - orange, gear 3 - red, gear 4 - green, gear 5 - purple, gear 6 - blue OMG! black dice = damage dice.

(of course, that is before you realise the wicked
corners that are coming up and you burn rubber and metal to slow down
frantically)

Each player got 2 cars and as a result, there were
8 cars racing on the board. This game amazingly can handle 5 players
with 2 cars each, or 10 players with one car each! A good game to have
for the occasion of having 8+ players.

Lots of reckless drivers
abound as the newbie racers went neck to neck into the corners,
scratching paintjobs and occasionally, doing damage to their own
bodywork.

In a car that’s designed for two races, some of the
(shall-not-be-unnamed-to-protect-their-identity) players limped past
the chequered flag in the first lap with a badly damaged car.

The
corner mechanics are pretty neat as it forces the racers to stop a
requisite number of times in the corners in a low gear before shifting
up for the exit. The lane changing mechanic is also quite inspired as
it often creates a situation where the front driver can benefit from an
open lane to change lanes according to how fast his car is going.
Whereas the back driver will find himself putting the brakes on his car
when confronted by the blocking maneuver of the front car. Definately a
game to play for the experience of car racing.

The game comes
with two tracks and lots of expansion tracks to bid on ebay. The tracks
that came with the game are quite good as it features the technically
demanding Monaco circuit and the (comparatively) more relaxed Holland
circuit.

The game’s a bit longish as it took the 4 of us about 2
hours to finish 1 lap. The rules are not particularly tough and the
main strategy is in trying to get out of a corner fast enough to outrun
the rest.

In our game, lostboyz’s first car on the starting grid
ended up finishing second last due to his prudent taking of the corners
while his last car ended up finishing first due to his risk taking on
going into the corners. jack208 also did well with one of his cars,
showing us how to go into a corner fast and then take a minor fuel
penalty to fast-downthrottle rapidly. I did okay with both my cars
finishing consistently in the middle. laiwah took too many a safe
approach and was thus left in the dust by other maniac
pedal-to-the-metal drivers. Although, to be on the fair side, she would
have won if we did two laps like we originally promised to

One game down, one more to go. Round 2 started at 12am with jack208 explaining the rules of Wallenstein
to ayheng and lostboyz. rhyen temporarily got the boyz’ hopes up by
declaring that he was making his way from Mages to Boardgamecafe. Which
however he did not turn up. And so we settle into a three player game.

The
game’s a area-control game with some wargaming elements settled by the
infamous cube-tower!

How it works is like this: you take your army
cubes, you take your opponents army cubes, shake it up in your hand and
throw them into the cube tower! some cubes will get stuck, and other
cubes got stuck there before might come unstuck! So what happens is an
interesting result which favors the person with the more cubes… MOST
of the TIME. Not always. Sometimes your cube just don’t want to drop
out.

Cube
towers aside, there’s some planning to be had each round which
seriously causes some mind-f going on. Players start guessing and
second guessing other people’s actions. As all actions are put down
first and then revealed simultaneously, this will cause some serious
screwage to happen as players’ plan are thrown into wreck by unforseen
moves. Glorious!

jack208 seems to get the strategy on this one
as he finishes a respectable 2nd after losing precious points in the
first year to a peasant riot. Myself did badly as I didn’t manage to
get building majority on many provinces. lostboyz with his
devil-may-care attitude went on a province grabbing spree managed to
finish first as he was able to put down his rioting-starving-peasants.
Nice game.

The night finishes with more talk and finally a lite game of Pompeji
to intro to lostboyz.

This game is very lite and is right up
‘litegamer’ lostboyz’ alley. Another satisfied
tossing-meeples-into-da-burning-volcano customer.

Woo hoo! three games in a nite, we finished at 4-ish. Highlight for me tonite was Formula DE. But I don’t recommend anyone to get it because I WANT IT (wait till my next budget, sigh).

Last friday I went to my ritual fortnightly boardgaming session. This time I was joined by my primary school friend ,Phuah, and his bro.

We arrived at Old Town Kopitiam Cheras (OTK) at 8.30 to find Jeff and Ainul engaging in a serious 2-player game of Caylus. Their game of jousting continued for awhile before Ainul wins it handily. Jeff then declared that he has yet to find a way to counter the apparently powerful building favor track (which Ainul was using), with the money and prestige points favor track.

However I felt that Jeff could have countered the building favor track by activating the lawyer and master builder instead to access the residences and prestige buildings. However things are probably not that simple since I *didn’t* watch the game diligently from start to finish.

Meanwhile, Alvin and Wong had started to arrive. After the Caylus game finished and was kept, we started Antike. With two games under my belt, I went for a more peaceful route in the beginning by building a temple to boost my gold production. The preliminary aim of course, was to go for the tech VPs. Ainul, Jeff and Alvin, being veterans, also went for tech VPs, but elected to get their gold from expansionism. Newbies Phuah and his bro, experimented with the temple building path while barbarian Wong tried for an early military strategy.

Now playing Antike requires some experience and experience shows that the first thing to do was to grab on the limited tech VPs before they run out. Next set of VPs should come from a mix of expansionism and temple building before scoring the homerun on the temple sacking VPs. Needless to say Phuah bros and Wong found out too late to be in contention for the game. Their strategy got them only so far before they found themselves stuck. Hopefully they’ve paid their learning dues and do better next time.

Phuah bros’ experiment of building too much temples was quite novel but stuck in the end of not having enough army to defend them. Wong on the other hand expanded too early and had not build up a proper support for his army generation (iron resource) and movement (tech).

From what I see, the early military strategy is quite hard to maintain. So far the numbers seems to be against this strategy.

Our game of Antike ended with Jeff grabbing the final VP for the win with myself close behind but delayed by one turn. Ainul and Alvin was in the middle pack while Phuah bros and Wong were in the last.

After that we played Alvin’s copy of Super Munchkin. A fun game, with elements of adventure and role-playing as players attempt to be the first Level-10 Superhero!

The multitude of card text to read initially threw us off a little, despite its reputation as a simple game. Some timing issues with the card play here and questions of card interactions put this game firmly in the category of thematic American-type game, rather than the mechanical driven Euro-game. The theme of superheroes challenging whacky super-villains using even whackier super-powers is well implemented and had us all laughing and having a fun time. Overall the response has been positive.

After this, we adjourned to BoardgameCafe to play Twilight Imperium III (TI3). To indoctrinate Henry in the varieties of TI3, we elected to use the old black bordered strategy cards (Henry played with the white strategy cards before). Every player was dealt two race cards in order to provide them with a choice. Jeff picked the dastardly Barony of Letnev, Henry went with the annoying Brutherhood of Yin, Phuah bros with the dreaded Lixiz, Wong with the multipurpose Winnu and myself the peaceful trading race of the Emirates of Hacan.

This being a gathering of eurogamers, we all diligently picked the Imperial strategy card when it was offered to us, followed by Initiative. Next popular was Tech and the rest is… just not so popular. I guess playing with a bunch of eurogaming-VP-chasing people is a bit different when playing with your own blood thirsty gaming group.

Conflict was pretty limited as players contented with building fleets rather than fighting. The Letnev, Yin and Hacan were the peaceful culprits as they attempt to arrange their pretty spaceships onto the vastness of the board space, contentingly shuffling them around in a maneuver reminisence of the China-Taiwan-US wargames: lots of dust but no shots fired.

Wong on the other hand tried to live up to his billing of a barbarian and his Winnu quickly cemented a pact with the Hacans, in order to turn on his other neighbour: the Lixiz. The Lixiz obligingly engaged in an early arms race, capitalising on his race’s advantage with dreadnoughts to bring up an impressive fleet of death dealing star destroyers.

The Winnu struck early and sent the Lixiz backpedalling. At one point, came knocking on Lixiz’s homeworld. Lixiz was forced to recall their mighty fleet to deal with the costly annoyance.

Hacans, being bored, took over Mecatol Rex even though his objective did not depend on it. Letnevs, emboldened at last by their painstakingly researched and built warsun descended upon Mecatol Rex and took over without batting an eyelid. Yin, goodness knows what they are doing, were having a whale of a time flipping their resource<—>influence using their racial ability and only elected to strike only when victory for the Letnevs were assured.

Overall, a rather conflict-free TI3 game that lasted 6 hours. We left at 7am in the morning… Nuts!

Damn sad, already one week and still no feedback for bubbles’ post. This either means that:
a) the mud was good, or
b) no one cares about bubbles

Bubbles demand feedback! Just tell him that the mud was good…

And while we’re on the subject of feedback, we’re still waiting for the following photos to come back to us for further posting:
a) Kong Eng’s gf Ee Lee’s Kijal pics
b) Jeff Au’s pics of my primary school friend, Phuah, in boardgames meetup.
Look for further updates when I get the pics… whenever the evil bastards see fit to send them to me.

Other updates: been reading Fermat’s Last Theorem, a book by Simon Singh, about Mathematicians. I find his descriptions of mathematicians fits me, in that I’m precise to a dot, I formulate my responses slowly just because I like my answers to be short, straight, succinct and precise.

The book itself, surprisingly, was not dry like a textbook. Instead, it has plenty of drama and quirky characters in it. From Pythagoras (who was persecuted for his maths) to Andrew Wiles (the modern day ‘hero’ of the book), the book describes the history of mathematics through the trials and tribulations of extraordinary people (read: mathematicians) and their quest to prove a centuries-old maths theorem by de Fermat, hence the name of the book.

After reading the book, I feel really intrigued by the world of academic mathematics. I would think that I’d studied the wrong degree, particularly since I’d always won prizes in maths during primary, secondary and college. Also, in boardgaming, there’s a very famous designer who is a pHd in mathematics, a Dr Knizia, which seems to suggest that maths is a good path to boardgame designing… Then again, after reading that mathematicians have a history of dying young or burned out of ideas young, a more practical degree still seems like a better choice. (chicken out)

To end this post, a photo that I’d missed out previously:

Li li playing 1856!!! Haha, actually I’m playing, but hidden by the camera. As you can see, it’s part of my diabolical plot to make her an ambassador of boardgames, this photo will bring lots of her friends into boardgaming, one colleague at a time, muahahaha! (now where did I put my kevlar vest, I’ve a feeling I need it…)

April gaming went off to a good start when Li Li invited her friend, Lena, over for a chatting session. We eschewed the typical mamak for the Mages Cafe, a boardgame cafe of sorts. A good refreshing experience for both of them, we did Carcassonne 3-player, then Alvin joined us for a few rounds of Blokus. Li Li got the hang of the nasty tactics while Lena didn’t.

Another week pass and it’s introduction of Old Town Kopitiam Cheras Friday Nite gaming to my primary school friend, Phuah. An unfortunate victim of my early days forays into game design, Phuah was nevertheless an avid gamer who was said to be the champion of ‘wei qi’ in my primary school. That night, Phuah was intro-ed to Bang!, Coloretto, Caylus, Havoc and Battleline. An okay session, one in which Phuah commented that he was bewildered by the many games played.

Then of course there’s the Kijal trip with the many games of Bang!, Heck Meck and Coloretto.

1st of May saw Li Li wanting to find out about the games that I play (which she assures won’t be a permanent curiosity). So she join us for a spot of gaming at Boardgamescafe Cheras. We did 6-nimmt (Take-6)

and then she watched as veterans out-maneuver each other in a competitive game of 1856. Lotsa rules, this game, not sure she followed every step.

2nd of May saw me and Li Li filling our time by getting reacquainted with Jon and Sze Sze. Long time no see. Again Li Li suggested Mages Cafe for that novelty thing and a spot of gaming should we run out of things to say. We didn’t run out of things to say but that doesn’t stop us from intro-ing Jon and Sze to gaming! We did Blokus, HEck MEck and Carcassonne. Fun times again as Jon and Sze gets reaquainted with the competitive/nasty side of Aik Yong (Nyuk! Nyuk! nyuk! :P)

This week: hopefully a second intro game for Phuah at Friday Night Boardgaming!

Thanks to popular demand, here’s Bubbles!

Thank you for joining us today for another segment of THE Bubbles Show. As you can see, I’m in my sunnies and beach wear for today’s special segment on Kijal Trip ‘07 (TM).
Now if you will all look to the left, we’ll see some classic Malayan seaside Coconut trees framing a wooden dwelling which locals call ‘kam-pung’.

Now if you’ll all pay attention to this…

…Aacckk!!! who STOLE MY CLOTHES?!?! That’s it, no more Bubbles Show for you!

Hhhmmpphhh!!! Kiss my Pink Furry Butt or I won’t continue!!!

*SMOOCH!*

Okay, who did that? I was just kidding, remember to buy me some MUD later.

So this is our Resort: StRaWbErRy PaRk KiJaL!

Nice place, Apartments on Stilts novelty.
Here’s the view:

Nice leafy trees, eh? Real quiet place.
Here’s the other view:

Now this is the scary part, we live next to a huge abandoned hotel, never completed, don’t know why, must be some ghost or some sort.
Here’s the Beach:

Again nice place, is so private that we are the only ones there! (which is good since no one else can see the big bad bellys these boys have, snort, snort!)
Here are some chairs:

Sure is windy here! Waves can go up to 1m high! Cowabunga!
1st night Dinner is stuffed shell crab:

All seafood and no pork… which makes Bubbles an unhappy pig. Eat Pork!
Next day’s breakfast, classic bread + tuna & maggi mee cup

A pimp and his two gigolos then debated about lunch:

Which was decided to be ‘western food’

Stopped by Kuala Kemaman…

… to see some sea shells sold by the seashore!

Some locals playing chess in the tree shade…

…geese crossing the road!

we stopped by for some Otak-otak

and it’s yummy brother in ketupat form!

greedy pigs!

Aik Yong: …mmm… smm… ssooo nice!

li li: can i have yours?

vincent: hhmm… a present for me? i wonder what’s inside?

vincent: drat! it’s an otak-otak, not a dopod!

evenings was again spent on the beach. there’s some rock outcroppings to the side of the beach

which inspired:

some calender girl…

…photo taking contest!

Then it got weird

the guys joined in for some monkey-see-monkey-do

ivan thought he had it all good…

… until his gf shows him who’s boss!

For 2nd night dinner we had Ikan Bakar

well, that’s just about wraps up this show

the TV wasn’t turn on a lot on this trip

with the nice natural surroundings (MUD!)

indoor Booze, ghost story and relationship sharing sessions

Boardgame sessions of Bang!, Heck Meck, Coloretto… (Hey, I shot the sheriff!)

Fun times! Final day we went to Hai Peng for Coffee…

Spagetti…

and me…

oops, just kidding.
take our final trip across the road of Kemaman town

we made it home later… right after a tasty delicious Thai-style dinner!

Wish you were here!

Advanced Squad Leader Starter Kit, or better known as ASLSK among wargamers is an introductory game to its parent - the full ASL game.

I got ASLSK#2 for the longest time as a basic intro to wargaming. An entry pass to the world where cardboard chits rather than wooden cubes are the norm. The 16 pages of rulebook was complex beyond hell despite being a ’shortened’ version of the encyclopediac full rules. The full rules, according to the people who bought it, was the size of an encyclopedia, no kidding.

So what’s a eurogamer accustomed to simple rules and multiple examples to do? Why join a wargames meetup and get someone to teach, of course!

With General Chua supervising, Lieutenant Nick led private Heng (myself) and the US squad against Major Castor leading the opposing private Jeff and the Germans.

We played with a simplified setup and simplified rules. The scene: a number of US squads trying to reinforce a position under siege from German squads.

Here we are pushing chits around, simulating squads under stress and bullet hail. To General Chua’s credit, the rules taught were as simple as can be. However, the overall picture is still a blur. The consolation I get is that I’m confident enough to want to try out a scenario in my copy of the game.

Of course General Chua made it clear that raw recruits like us can only learn so much in our first game and he had to leave out a lot of subtleties in the proper game. The demo/learning game ended with the US squad in disarray and getting wiped out by the more organised Germans. Oh well, try again another time.

On the other end of the table, Edwin here can be seen teaching a newbie in the Art of War in the Memoir ‘44 game. Our end traded insults with their end over their ‘plastic toy soldiers’ and our ‘cheap cardboard chits’ LOL

A close up of the ‘plastic toy soldiers’ in Memoir ‘44. A eurogame-wargame hybrid, with the rules much much much more much simpler than ASLSK.

We now hijack your regular boardgame show to bring you a special message:

Bubbles: When you feel down and you need peace,

Bubbles: … turn to MUD, smear it all over your face…

Bubbles: … if you can’t find dirt and water,

Bubbles: … turn ye to bottled MUD!

Bubbles: *advertisement alert* Celmonze’s Spa Facial Scrub MUD Mask. Get yours today! *advertisement alert*

Bubbles: Remember, MUD for world peace! Yeah! (ears flap) snort snort!.

I’m of course talking about the Twilight Imperium III game session which we did over the Chinese New Year at my place. The added sauce comes from the Shattered Empires expansion set which was bought the week before from the local boardgame crack dealer.

As this is the first time we added the expansion and that many Malaysian boardgamers are probably interested in knowing how it plays, this will be a semi-review of it.

There are a lot of new OPTIONAL stuff which comes with the expansion set. We chose the following options:

1) New races
We added in the 4 new races for random selection. The new races are interesting and gives a player a whole new way of playing the game.

2) New political, action and secret objective cards
More sauce to an already varied game. Nothing particularly stands out in this first game.

3) New tech cards
More sauce and finally, a way to really hamstrung those pesky fighters

4) Variant strategy cards
These draw a mix reaction.
a) Leadership - not as powerful as the old Initiative to go first. However still picked often due to it providing command counters to fulfill one of the new public objectives
b) diplomacy II - we played it wrong the whole game as we used it to ’signal’ jam an opponent’s system every turn. You can actually signal jam your own system with your opponent’s command counters only, thereby preventing them invading you. Not sure about this as it’s really a different ability from the old diplomacy.
c) assembly - having an ability to choose which agendas to resolve is quite powerful and will at least be useful to the player activating the ability. However, in practise we find it difficult to have a big enough selection of political cards to do anything useful. Perhaps a house rule to cycle cards or draw more cards is in order.
d) production - quite a favourite pick, especially for turtling or peaceful players. Speeds up units massing, but that’s about it.
e) trade II - now this is quite nasty, being able to cancel specific trade agreements instead of a blanket all around.
f) warfare II - this is quite a poor pick as we missed the double activation ability of the old warfare strategy. the +1 dice roll is nice, but the one turn activation kinda prevents sneak attack. Maybe if we can activate and attack immediately.
g) technology II - the star of the lot, tech II makes getting tech a lot more easier… making that war sun faster to come out.
h) beauracracy - another mix reaction. the ‘as many objective as bonus counter’ mechanic is quite cool, however, the game becomes a little pointless in the beginning as no one is willing to take this strategy card to reveal public objectives for all.

All being said, a four player game again is optimum with the new strategy cards. Other than that, I would mix and match next time with Initiative, Diplomacy II, assembly, logistics, trade II, warfare, technology II and imperial II.

5) variant objectives
these objectives encourage more conflict. quite good

6) race specific technologies
some races absolutely rely on them to function. must play

7) wormhole nexus
very scary, wormholes are now ultra functional and the universe just became smaller and crowded.

Before we start our game, we had our Bah Kut Teh to carry us through the day!

Setup time! Our races were Clan of Saar -yellow (heng), Embers of Muaat -blue (paul), Naalu -black (ivan), Jol Nar - purple (edward) and Lizix - green (alvin).

universe setup. resources on the Jol-Nar, Lizix, Naalu belt.

Purple troops, prepared for deployment onto the battlefield. Curious, really, how people like to arrange their units during game time…

Talking about arranging, feast your eyes on mine!

As the game progresses, the units were put on board as they were built… then taken off as they were destroyed. The units naturally lose their formation

The Lizix (green) made an early grab for Mecatol Rex, citing ignorance from other races as an excuse. Unbeknowst to Lizix, Embers (blue) and Saar (yellow) had being eyeing the prime victory point gaining real estate as well, staging their fleets in close proximity…

The Embers (blue) strike!! Their mighty warsun cleared out Lizix’s (green) ships AND ground troops using their deathstar strike! The Embers really made good use of their early superiority on this.

Tragedy! Naalu (black) invaded Embers (blue) while their warsun was out conquering Mecatol Rex. A string of lucky rolls consigned Embers’ ships to destruction as Naalu made use of their psychic abilities to make preemptive strikes. Saar (yellow) can be seen here happily making a small invasion on Lizix (green) world, thanks in part to the conflict-oriented objective cards.

Here Lizix (green) retook their system, Naalu (black) continued their steamrolling of Embers (blue) using their special lucky dice while Jol-Nar (purple) took over a vacated Mecatol Rex. Lizix allied with Naalu and pressed on Embers’ undefended systems.

After many many turns, the races ar estill at 0 & 1 victory points… thanks in no part to the unattractive beauracracy strategy card. There’s no shortage of command counters to be had with the Leadership strategy card, hence no one took strategy cards for the sake of only one or two bonus counters.

The whole setup towards the game end.

The game ended with either Lizix or Naalu winning (can’t remember). The new expansion actually favors military conquest as peaceful races now will find it hard to fulfill objectives and thus gain points. There’s still some optional items in the expansion that we did not play. Perhaps those items can alter the gameplay experience, e.g. artifacts, space mines, shock troops, etc.

However, as mentioned above, the strategy cards mix for the next game will be chosen based on the number of players. Our group is kinda peaceful and the amount of conflict in this game is a bit out of our sorts. Oh well, we’ll find out in our next game session!