Alien Artifacts Rulebook Update

Spacefaring is a tough job. While there are mechanisms in the game, that allow to quickly rebuild a damaged ship, they caused some pretty overpowered combo.

From the beginning our intention was, that having your ship damaged is bad and loosing it is worse. While the latter stays true, when the game was released, the former turned out to be sometimes beneficial. Thousands of players started creating their powerful combos. We have learned about them through conventions and BGG forums. Many of them were great and perfectly balanced option. One of them, however, was particularly powerful, making dozens of points per turn. When your ship was damaged during an attack it could return back to your empire and attack again, if its cost was lower than the discount. This combo was still luck-dependent – if the ship were destroyed, it couldn’t return to your empire and trigger the next attack. If the ship succeeded without an issue, it stayed in your empire and couldn’t attack again. After gathering the feedback from many players, reading through the BGG forums, our testing and developing teams decided, that we need to add a small clarification to the rules.

That added rule reflects our intention, that having your ship damaged is always bad and having it destroyed is always worse. It simply states, that “Each Ship may only attack once per turn.”. You can download the updated rulebook here: https://rebrand.ly/AlienArtifactsRulebook

Have fun playing Alien Artifacts and use your ships responsibly!