SpaceCorp: Ventures

SpaceCorp: Ventures is a respectable expansion for an already demanding game, which sounds colder than it is. Its sixteen new companies can make a game feel remarkably different through only small changes to their rules, and the solo mode is improved enough that the old version now looks like a draft. The lack of extra cards still stings, particularly at four players, where each era could use a little more material.

Within SpaceCorp’s existing era structure, each company bends your priorities in a different direction: some push ahead with almost indecent ease, while others ask you to assemble elaborate combinations and can reward you with as many as three consecutive turns. The base game’s framework remains intact; what changes is who can exploit that framework best. That is sufficient to keep successive games from feeling interchangeable.

Interaction is mostly about getting in the way and cutting off another player’s plans. A company can be absurdly potent in the right conditions, until it meets the company that shuts it down — Space Nomads against Transport Inc is the clean example. The difficulty is that, when not everyone knows the companies in play, balance leaves through the window with considerable purpose.

Difficulty bands, colour coding, or recommended company sets would have made first contact less like a modest exercise in mine detection. Instead, Ventures provides plenty of replayability without new discoveries, colonies, cards, genetics, revelations, or a new map — without, in other words, working on the places where an expansion might reasonably have done more. It gives SpaceCorp fresh life, while allowing its most predictable problems to continue their careers.