Seeders from Sereis: Exodus

Seeders from Sereis: Exodus had been on my table-wish-list for a while. Its English life is an awkward one: that edition arrived slightly changed from the original French release, and its expansions have not made the trip into English. Shame, because this is a strange and compelling marriage of engine building and bidding, built around a card deck with the sheer bulk of Ark Nova.

The cards are either rooms or crew. Each round begins with players drafting some of them, then twelve are laid out on the board and you send agents to contest them. Variants cover drafting or no drafting, visible or hidden agents, so the same skeleton can be made more legible or considerably more devious. The rulebook, for once, is not the thing picking a fight.

Once the contest is over, you install rooms and crew into your own engine, trigger abilities, collect VP, and naturally look for ways to hit everyone else. Across four rounds, you need to know when to drive your engine forward and when to cut somebody else down; leave a player unchecked and the scoring gap becomes brutal. You will wreck your friends’ plans, and they may crown you king for all the wrong reasons.

This is not for every group. The take-that and kingmaking can leave someone properly deflated, and its real weight lies not in the basic systems but in the density of the cards, a little like 51st State. It needs several plays before everyone can read the deck and its threats properly. For groups that want precisely that sting, though, it is genuinely unlike the usual fare — quietly excellent.