Don’t have time to commit to a multi-game campaign across 3 acts and a prologue? i don’t blame you! The Battles expansion for Stars of Akarios supplies you with a book of one-shot encounters that you can just choose from at random. Minor rules modifications allow you to shop and upgrade your ship in the middle of the battle, giving you a taste of progression without taking nearly as much time.
Spare me your carefully crafted lore: i just wanna shoot something! Hi – it’s Ryan from Nights Around a Table. Here’s how to play Battles of Akarios, which is an expansion for Stars of Akarios. If you haven’t learned how to play the base game, watch that video first!.
As you know, Stars of Akarios is a campaign game with three acts and dozens of scenarios to play through. But what happens if you have friends over who don’t want to get embroiled in a multi-game campaign? What if you just want to get in, shoot some dudes, and get out? That’s what Battles of Akarios is for. In tabletop rpg terms, it’s a collection of one-shot adventures.
This expansion gives you a brand new book of battles that you can just flip through and pick from in any order, for game nights when you want to cut straight to the chase. Setup is even easier than in the base game, because you play directly on top of the battle book, and all of the asteroids, nebulae, and special hexes are pre-printed on each map, along with the starting positions for the good guy and bad guy ships.
To kick it off, pick any Scenario from the Battles book. Everyone grabs any pilot they like, along with that pilot’s level 1 upgrade card. Then you grab any ship you like, and its level 1 ship upgrade card. Ignore the hull and shield settings on the ship tile: you can pick any starting hull and shield values you like, as long as they add up to 12. So you can go 10 hull and 2 shields, 2 hull and 10 shields, 6 of each, or whatever wacky combination tickles your fancy. Later in the game, if you repair your hull or shield, you are limited to whichever numbers you originally chose at the beginning of the Scenario.
Then, you can pick a weapon upgrade and an engine upgrade from the upgrade deck numbered 1 to 4… so any of these ones, and any of these ones. But don’t worry: you don’t have to stick to the baby weapons and engines the whole time: in Battles of Akarios, you can upgrade your ship at market while you’re in the middle of a dogfight!
Mr Dingles: lay down suppressive fire. I’m going to the mall.
To put the Market together, grab all the weapon, engine, and tech upgrade cards that are restricted to the ship classes represented in your game. So if at least one of you picked a heavy, make sure the decks include all the “H” cards. You can also include all the cards that don’t have any class restrictions. Shuffle those decks, and deal out 4 cards to each row at random.
You don’t need to put any supply cubes on your starting upgrade cards; instead, you’ll grab a supply dial and set it to 1. You also won’t need your modifier deck — it gets completely replaced by this 8-sided modifier die. You won’t need the enemy modifier deck either — the enemy modifier die takes care of that — but you still need to set up the boards for all the enemies, and shuffle their enemy action decks.
So this new supply dial acts as both your charge for firing off your special abilities, and as the money you’ll need to upgrade your ship during battle. Any time you want to use an upgrade with a supply icon on it, you gotta knock your supply dial down by 1. Your dial can’t go under zero… or over 10.
Each time you start a new round, your supply goes up. So you start the battle with 1 supply. In round 2, you get an allowance of 2 more supply points. In round 3, you get 3 more supply points, and so on.
If you assign one of your unused action dice to the Market at any point during the Pilot Action Phase, you can spend your supply points to buy stuff. Assigning a stress die to the market doesn’t make your stress go up. Each supply point you spend is worth 15 credits. That means that any “resupply” benefit, like on the basic repair action, is now essentially a license to print money. While at Market, you can buy as much stuff as you want or can afford to, but if you overpay, you can’t make change. Fill in the gap after you buy a card. If you don’t like what’s on offer, you can spend 1 supply from your dial to deal out an additional weapon, engine, and tech card.
The new thing you bought goes into a matching empty slot on your player board — you’re not allowed to trade it away to another player, like you can before a Space Combat mission in the base game. If all the matching slots on your player board are filled, you have to bump out something that’s already there. If you’ve got a flipped-over damaged upgrade, you can’t kick it out of the slot to put a new thing there.
Instead of using your modifier deck when you attack, you roll a modifier die. It has 2 stress icons, a -1, a resupply, an extra shield, a zero, a +1, and a +2. If you roll a stress symbol on this die, your stress doesn’t go up… instead, something happens to you depending on your current stress level. If it’s at zero, rolling a stress modifier multiplies your attack by 2. If your stress is low at 1 or 2 points, you get a +1 modifier. At 3 or 4 stress, your attack isn’t modified. At 5-7, it becomes a negative 1, and if you’re having a panic attack at 8 or above, rolling a stress on the modifier die is just like pulling a miss card from your modifier deck in the base game!
You’ll roll the black modifier die for the enemy, instead of pulling from the enemy modifier deck like usual. This die is a little different, since it doesn’t have stress symbols: There’s a zero, two +1’s a +2, two -1s, a -2, and a miss, so the odds are generally weighted in your favour. Most of the enemies in this game graduated from the Stormtrooper Marksmanship Training Academy, so don’t be too afraid to get in their crosshairs!
As in the base game, keep playing until you’ve met the objective, or everyone gets shot out of the sky! And now, you’re ready to play Battles of Akarios.
For Busy Gamers on the Go
Any board gamer out of high school understands that the real bottleneck to playing is making enough friends who can commit their time to playing with you. Battles meets an important need by allowing you to foist your expensive Kickstarter purchase on new players and give them a bigger taste of the experience, instead of just trialling new people on the Prologue again and again until somebody loves you.
If you’d like to add Stars of Akarios to your board game collection, shop using the link below and we’ll receive a small commission.
