Core Space: First Born Review

boardgamequest.com:

We review Core Space: First Born, a scifi dungeon crawler board game published by Battlesystems. In Core Space: First Born, players are traders exploring alien ships in the hunt for loot.

One look at Core Space: First Born all set up and you will know why I wanted to try it out. The table presence for this sci-fi miniatures game is off the charts. You have walls, terrain elements, cool-looking miniatures, and piles of tokens. But is there a game in here or is it all flash (Ala Plunder: A Pirates Life)? Time to find out!

Core Space: First Born is a cooperative, RPG style game for 1-4 players that takes 60+ minutes to play.

There is a lot going on with Core Space: First Born, so I’ll just give you a high-level overview of the gameplay. While there are expansions for this system to enhance your game, the core box comes with one team of traders and a 10-mission campaign. The missions can also be played standalone if you’d prefer.

But a crew is comprised of one or more traders, usually 3-4. Each player can control 1 trader, or one player can control more. Once you are on a mission, the game is played out over a series of phases. The round starts with a hostility phase where a peg is added to the hostility tracker and an event card is drawn. Events can be good or bad and will vary depending on the hostility level.

Then the Trader phase happens. This gives every player character (called traders) 2 actions. The main actions you will be taking are moving (4 squares), attacking (ranged and melee), and searching. Attacks are handled via die rolls, with hits needing to bypass armor to do damage. Range attacks will roll more dice depending on the range and the weapon used. Interestingly, every turn you make a ranged attack, one of