Microverse Interview: Sam London

 

Microverse is a fast-playing, card-driven space 4x game. The game features lightning fast turns (sub 5 seconds most of the time) and a short playtime (15 minutes per player) while packing in all the hallmarks of a full 4x game. Players will guide their civilizations from humble beginnings on a single planet to galaxy spanning empires fighting over choice planets.

The images and rules shown here are not final.

You can find it in P500

- Tell us a little about yourself. How did you get started in the hobby?

I’ve been playing board games all my life. They started to become my focal hobby in 2007 as I began to fall out of love with video games. Board gaming became even bigger for me as I realized how inherently social it was. All these years later it is still my favorite way to spend my free time.

- Where did you get the idea to make the game?

My process as a game designer usually starts with playing another game and deciding to fix issues I personally had with it. In the case of Microverse there was no single game, but rather the entire 4x genre. I love 4x games, but they have a tendency to be so overwhelming that they are intimidating to new players and take so long to play that they can only be tabled twice a year at best. My design goal for Microverse was to encapsulate the full 4x experience in a much faster play time.

- Tell us about the mechanics

If I was going to make Microverse faster, I needed to make player turns as smooth as possible. To accomplish that I made it so you are only performing one action type per turn, though you can perform as many of those actions as you can afford. Each player has a hand of cards, with each card corresponding to one of the games four action types (Build, Colonize, Explore, and Mobilize). On your turn you play as many cards as you wish of one type. Each card played generates a resource point of that type, which is then increased by the number of matching resource points on your colonized worlds (each planet has action types it grants bonuses towards). This total is the number of resource points you have available to spend on actions during your turn.

You spend Build resource points to build fleets on your colonies, Colonize resource points to build colonies on new worlds, Explore resource points to search for new worlds, and Mobilize resource points to move your fleets around.

Microverse is essentially a racing game, with each player trying to be the first to achieve one of the game’s four victory conditions. A player wins an Expanse Victory if they have any of their pieces in 10 or more sectors (hexes) at the start of their turn. They win an Empire Victory if they begin their turn with all 6 of their colonies in play. They win a Conquest Victory immediately if they destroy any opponent’s home colony. Finally, as players explore the galaxy they will find ancient alien ruins (the Monoliths). Once enough of these have been found (2 per player) it triggers an apocalyptic end game within 3 rounds. If the game hasn’t ended otherwise at the end of those 3 rounds, the player who controls the most of the Monoliths wins a Transcendence Victory.

There are a few other things going on like diceless card based combat, trading, and a political Senate round, but that should give you an idea of the game’s base mechanics.

- Can you tell us about the factions?

One of the major design choices I made with Microverse was to make the base mechanics as simple as possible. I decided I would pack in all the fun chrome into the game’s factions, and let the players choose how simple or complicated they wanted their game to be. As such, each faction is rated on a complexity scale that indicates how much they alter the game’s core rules for themselves and for other players.

There will be 21 factions in the core game. Each faction is entirely unique in Microverse, and has its own strength, weakness, and scalable research ability. There are certain planets that, as they are colonized, increase the potency of the controlling faction’s research ability. Each faction also fits into 4 different classes, Administrators, Conquerors, Diplomats, and Wayfinders. Administrators generally focus on empire building and fleet production. Conquerors do exactly what they sound like they do. Diplomats have more of a metagame focus and tend to have mechanics that interact with trading and the Senate. Wayfinders are exploration experts who have a lot of mechanics that interact with the Monoliths.

With 21 factions in the core box, there is a good fit in there for everyone. The Human Diaspora are the game’s tutorial faction. They add no special rules to the game at all, and their research ability simply increases their hand size (which is very powerful). Also noteworthy, if you are playing solitaire the bot always plays as the Human Diaspora. The Nallaht Syndicate can set aside cards to form a marketplace that anyone at the table can use, but in doing so the Nallaht get to draw cards and cycle their hand. The Eye of Osiris have super dreadnaughts that can blow up entire planets (no obvious inspiration there). The Yarzai Flood have organic ships that can simply reproduce in space and break into smaller ships when destroyed. The Saurvid Crusade obsessively search the galaxy for the Monoliths, and every time they find one their fleets get permanently stronger. These are just some examples of the variety each faction brings to the table.

- According to the product description it announces that more factions will be coming. Can we expect future expansions for the game?

Thankfully, the game is already doing very well on the P500, so it is likely we will be making expansions. As I said the game has 21 playable factions, but I have designed 80 so far, and am trying to push past 100 total factions. The first expansion would be a second core box, with 20 new factions (the Human Diaspora must be in both boxes), which when combined with the original core box let you play with up to 8 players. From there I have enough factions left over to do many faction expansions in the future.