Fractal Beyond the Void Overview

well hey everyone my name is pete krause with modern cardboard and today i'm going to do just a little different video than what i normally do which is like a how to play this is going to be an overview video on a game called fractal beyond the void now the game designer so graciously lent me a prototype copy of this game that i got to play through and i'll be doing a full how to play of this in the future once i get all the components to it so i thought it'd be kind of cool to give you a sneak peek of this one so let's dive in so fractal beyond the void is a 4x game and 4x games are some of my favorite types of themes when it comes to board games especially if they're really theme heavy if we look down here we have our galaxy map or board and i'm set up for two players we have a starting sector for the gold player here and a starting sector for the green player here some of the sectors on this which are hexes are placed in kind of a firm starting order when you set up the game and then some of these are randomized if we set up for a three or four player game the map grows and i'd add additional starting sectors going over to the player board we can see that each player gets an empire board and a faction board these are actually independent of each other so you can select your color and then select your faction at the start of the game you get to select from seven different factions and if you go through the aftermath campaign mode you'll unlock five additional factions up here we have our action cards which i'll talk about that get used during the action phase we have our mystery deck and some additional tokens we have kind of what i call our technology market and then we have our round track here or our era track however we want to call it and most importantly on our board is our objective card if you're interested in how you win the game which everyone should be this is how you do it objective cards are randomized you actually have eight different objective cards that the game starts with and so you're going to get randomly one of those this card shows you the different things that you have to do to gain victory points and that's like controlling sectors building colonies earning influence and acquiring technology the player who earns the most victory points wins the one thing i'll tell you right now is a game of fractal has four rounds there's actually two eras in a standard game of fractal arrow one consists of two rounds and then you have this transition phase and so at that point you're gonna look at the game state and score what's on this card for whoever meets the requirements there you have the possibility of earning five victory points and at that time out comes another objective card and for the next era rounds three and four you have some additional requirements that are needed to get victory points but now all victory points score two so there would be a possibility of earning 10 victory points then at the end of the fourth round some of you may ask okay why is there like rounds five and six on here well those only get used perhaps in some missions in the campaign mode a game of fractal beyond the void is made up of four rounds and each round consists of four phases there's the income phase action phase conflict phase and end of air phase so the income phase is an upkeep step that goes by really quickly and kind of gets you ready so you can take your actions step one is where any players would remove these depletion tokens if they're on any of the four basic actions and along with a couple other things during the income phase players check how much they get paid in credits based on what's on the farthest to the right exposed space on this productive track normally at the start of the game you'll get three credits for sure and then players collect their credits which look like these so during the action phase players take turns taking a mandatory two actions on their turn so one player takes two actions and then the next player takes two actions etc actions continue to take place until a player plays their second card based action which we'll look at in a minute on a player's turn during the action phase again each player must take two actions they can select from their four basic actions and they can't take the same basic action twice on the same turn they would have to take two different actions on the turn but they could do those two same actions again on another turn players can also take an optional action that's on their government card during the action phase and then players can do this thing called playing an action card the first action we're going to look at is the recruit action and the recruit action is how you build up your forces on a sector on the map to do this you spend one credit and if we look at the military track i can see that i can deploy two infantry so that's symbols for inventory and this one is for my light ships and so i could either deploy one light ship or two infantry i'm gonna choose two infantry so i take two of these and deploy them on the only sector that i have that has one of my colonies so let's just say it's the same turn and on this turn i can take another action because remember you must take two actions on your turn for my second action i let's say i take this advance action now the advance action is how you move your units or troops around the map to do this again this cost me one credit so i pay one credit and then i'm going to look at two different tracks the imperial track and scientific track these are the two tracks that really help you expand imperial tells you how many units you can move and so in this case this little upside down triangle means that i can move two units and then how many sectors i can move each one of those units is shown on my scientific track and that's shown down here at the bottom and since my del var faction starts with one of the scientific colonies already built i am allowed to move each one of those units to sectors as shown right here now the only units that you can really move around the map are your ships but your ships can carry infantry and your ships can also carry max the carrying capacity of a light ship is two in infantry is worth one a mech is worth two so that means a light ship could carry one mac or two infantry for one of my movements i could take my light ship and two infantry and move two sectors away now since i don't have any more ships i can't move any of these guys because obviously they don't have jet packs that could propel them to another planet all right so that would have been a turn for me because i took two actions and then play gets passed to the next player they would take two actions and then play goes back to me and so let's say it's my turn again the green player and i'm going to take another action and this time i'm going to take the colonize action here so i spend one credit move that back and now if i haven't talked about this already you might be seeing a pattern these are my colonies here as you build colonies you expand your engine and so you get more efficient you can do a lot more so colonization is really a big part of the game to get your engine moving so i can colonize in a sector where i have one infantry and there's no obstacle or anomaly let's just say on my last turn i just advanced to this productive sector here there's no obstacle or anomaly and i have infantry in this space so i can colonize here and the only colony i can place is a productive colony so i take the left most productive colony from the track and now you can see in the next income phase i'm going to get four credits instead of three and then i just place that in this colony spot and now i have a production colony so for my second action on my turn i'm going to take the research action that's going to cost me a credit but oh no i have no more credits left so what do i do well there's these handy things called depletion tokens and if you remember during the income phase the first step of that was to remove depletion tokens you only get to remove one and as soon as i put this depletion token on it i can use that in place of a credit but that means i can no longer take that action so i place the depletion token on research and now i get to take the action research lets you spend your science tokens to buy technology the amount of science tokens i get is shown on the scientific track at the top and since i have a scientific colony built i get three science tokens so i go up to this technology market and i take my science tokens and i can place them next to the technology card that i want now there's two technology cards per era of every type so there's kind of two for the players to fight over and it is okay for one player to have two of the same one the cost of the technology card is shown at the bottom here and you'll see that one's three and so i'm gonna do two things i'm gonna place my science tokens up here and if i meet or exceed that number then i get to take this technology and place it next to my board now since i bought that i also get to return those science tokens to my supply and this technology now means that i can build a colony in a non-habitable space now an interesting thing about actions is every player on their turn has the option to use one of these action cards for free they look at the four cards available kind of like in the action market and they can just take one of those and play it once they finish playing that card then a new one is revealed here a player can only play two action cards during a round on the turn they play their second card that essentially ends the action phase for that player and so the next time the action turn comes to them they're gonna pass and then the turn goes in clockwise order to who's ever left and hasn't passed one thing that's interesting about these action cards is you do feel a little bit pressured to play some of the cards because your opponent might use one of them on you and you might want to use it before they do but you don't want to rush the end of your action phase now the first player to be done taking actions takes this token the first player token and flips it over to this watcher side if they're sitting there waiting for other players to finish this gives them an advantage where once the action phase is done this player will get to take either an advance action or a recruit action for free i find this kind of helps equal the playing field if you finish taking actions first and another player gets to take several more so after the action phase a conflict takes place in any contested sector like the one here a battle medal gets placed in each contested sector players then simultaneously play one tactic card from their hand and compare the results each player normally will have six tactics and then they'll have one additional card for their warship and one for their max if they're in the battle so the number that's listed in the upper left corner is the initiative and the lower the initiative the faster the card activates the symbol in the upper right hand corner of the card shows you what military technology corresponds with this one and would trigger the tech upgrade at the bottom of the card what's shown in the center of the card depends on the troops that you have in that sector some allow you to inflict hits on the other player's unit some force those units to retreat to another sector and you'll continue playing cards until there's only one faction left in the sector so in this case after the battle let's say the gold player still had a mac and an infantry and they wiped out all the green players units they would collect the battle medal since they have one infantry here they could also decide if they wanted to raise or invade this colony so if this gold player decided to raise the colony they would remove it you would have the option to choose either two credits or to influence and they would gain a siege medal if they decided to invade the colony they would replace it with one of theirs the green colony would get placed back on the empire board of the green player and then they would just gain one influence and a siege medal no credits and one last thing when it comes to conflicts so there's some things or abilities that you'll find in this game that will let you switch and replace one of your normal cards with an elite card and that'll strengthen your normal tactic deck over time so that gives you a good idea of how a round works and just to recap you're going to play two rounds and then you go through this transition phase at the end of error one during the transition each one of these earns you one victory point if you meet the conditions as stated on the right side of the objective card you have the possibility here to earn up to five victory points then you draw and reveal an era two objective card and this shows you what you have to do just like we said to earn victory points for era two but remember after the end of era two each one of these is worth two victory points for a total of ten then you'll switch out all of the arrow one technology cards with the era two technology cards all the arrow one tech cards go back in the box then each player gets to trigger this mystery card that they drew at the beginning of the game and selected there so then at the end of round four then you score again and like i said these are all worth two if you meet the requirements as shown on the right side and that is the game victory points get tracked in the same category as shown on the objective card the reason there's categories for victory points is because when it comes to the campaign mode the aftermath campaign mode higher amounts of victory points in one category versus the other can determine what path you take in your campaign so that's it for this overview of fractal beyond the void so hopefully that gives you enough information so you can evaluate this game and see what you think i will also have a full how to play of this game and i'll put a link here on this end screen and then one down in the description once it's released so remember to like and subscribe and thank you for watching

Channel: Modern Cardboard

Views: 5,497

Rating: 5 out of 5

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Id: BAtJcICWWn4

Length: 14min 28sec (868 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 05 2021