Core Space First Born – How to setup and play your first game
In Core Space: First Born, players take on the role of Traders exploring ancient temples, belonging to the very first race that inhabited the Galaxy, The First Born. While these aliens are resting in their eternal slumber, the temples are far from being unprotected. Drones and defensive systems will immediately react to any intruders venturing the ancient halls and the Traders will need to think on their feet if they want to survive and avoid to be overwhelmed by the strength to the awakened First Borns.
In this stand-alone version of Core Space, the Traders’ goal is to survive as long as possible, complete some mission objectives and acquire as much loot as possible. The final goal of each mission is essentially to earn enough money to upgrade and develop your crew’s skills in order to be more effective during their next mission. While this aspect is just a nice perk when playing single mission, it becomes critical if players decide to use the campaign system provided.
Disregarding how you want to develop your team, Core Space: First Born starts from your very first mission therefore we would like to keep most of the campaign aspect out from this walk-through. Considering also that Battle systems provided a very handy tutorial scenario with reduced rules, we decided to pick the mission “Who Goes There?” as the best scenario for this content. Let’s board our spaceship to the temple and follow the steps or our intrepid traders as they move their first steps into Core Space: First Born.
A new Mission: preparing your crew and game setup
When I started playing Core Space I found that preparing your crew for your first mission is not an easy task as you have to balance a lot of factors. However, Core Space allows players to tailor their gameplay to fit their team thus it is really difficult to make “bad choices”. In addition, any choice a player makes when creating their Trader crew can be altered during the campaign.
Following the rules provided at page 50 of the Core rulebook, your standard Trader crew should start with 3 Traders and their equipment. Considering Hopper is not available at the beginning of the game, players should just pick Cassie, Wade and Balcor unless they have access to other Characters from any of the expansions. The total value of a standard crew for the chosen mission is 220 credits of which 205 would be taken by the three standard traders leaving just 15 credits to buy some equipment. The rulebook suggests a balanced set of weapons and tools that you should consider for your starting crew but you can pick any you prefer as far as the total value of them does not exceed 15. I personally avoided to pick any weapon for Balcor as he is already quite able in hand to hand combat even without any. I instead picked a cheap mining tool for him to gain some valuable materials by exploring the rooms. I also purchased a gun instead of a rifle for Wade to save more space for valuable loot. As I said, there are plenty of options to choose from but you should also consider that with a bit of luck you will find some decent weapons anyway during your mission.
After choosing your team, it is time to set up the terrains on the board to reflect the mission map at page 67 and to place your ship in the designed player arrival area. While you are setting-up the terrain, make sure you do not peek on the items you placed on the searchable locations as I found that opening them is one of the best part of this game. As mentioned initially, I assume this scenario will be played by a single crew of Traders although nothing stops multiple players to take control of them. This setup therefore covers both the solo game mode as well as the cooperative mode and it is also a good starting point for any multiplayer competitive games as well.
Once all Traders are on the board and the player(s) received their Trader dashboards together with all starting equipment and pegs, the game is ready to start. As you are using ready made Characters, I strongly recommend to carefully read to description of their Skill to make good use of them during your game. Battle Systems created a great set of Skill cards that can be purchased to help all players to improve the use of their Character abilities.
The last two tasks to complete the setup for this first mission are to prepare the event deck and the hostility tracker. In this scenario, the tracker starts at zero thus no pegs are added to it before the game starts, and the event deck includes all the cards listed on the bottom left of page 67.
Game Turn and Player Actions
Every round of Core Space: First Born starts with the Hostility phase. One or two black pegs are always added to the tracker at the beginning of the phase depending if the Trader crew includes less or more than 3 members.
Once the hostility tracker updated one of the players draws an event card, reads and resolves it. Players should consider that some events have different effects depending on which Hostility Level the tracker shows, and that in some cases some or all these effects may not be applicable if there are no valid targets. It is also important to note that you should alternate which player reads the event if you are playing cooperatively as the event deck also includes “Assistance cards” that can be saved to be used later in the game. These cards must be kept by the player that drew them.
Once the Hostility Phase completed, the Traders can perform their actions. Each Trader can perform a maximum of 2 actions per turns including moving, searching/mining, fighting, interacting and using special abilities. Search and mine are among the most important actions for a Trader as they allow them to collect all items from a searchable location or a random item or mineral from any room that has not been searched before. Remember: as a Trader, your aim is to find as many valuable items as you can in these Temples and then run out as fast as you can.
In addition to their two main actions, any Trader can perform one “Effortless action” per turn. The most common effortless action is to move one square to place your Trader in a better position or to throw a weapon with the effortless action icon on it. This type of actions can be performed at any time during their turn, not just at the end.
Once a Trader completes all their actions, the turn passes to the next Player clockwise till all Traders completed their turn.
Once the Trader phase completed, it is finally the turn of the First Born to take action. First, players need to determine if any enemy spawns based on the hostility tracker. In the first slot of the Tracker (“Patrol”) enemies have a chance to spawn only if there is an icon next to the farthest peg in the Tracker but in all subsequent phases they will spawn in waves. In some of these cases, enemy may spawn automatically or only if you roll an icon on the green dice. You should also remember that one Drone should be placed on the map at the very beginning of the game.
Every new enemy arrives at a random spawn point location. Once all enemies have been added to the map, they can immediately take two actions starting with the model with the highest rank. The game provides a very handy AI diagram to decide what actions the First Born models will take but essentially, they will always prioritize attacking the Traders if they are in range or moving towards them. Drone are slightly different as they will scan the area right after spawning and then move to the next patrol point and scan the area again for intruders. While it is not possible to forecast where the enemies will spawn is pretty easy to identify how the drones will move on the map therefore players should pay attention to keep their Traders hidden from the drones as long as possible to avoid the Hostility Tracker to escalate faster. At the same time, players should be aware that the “worm hole” markers on the game mat can quickly spawn terrifying Rock Worms thus it will be wise to keep you Traders as far as possible to those….
Fighting for survival
No matter how silently the Traders will move around, the First Born will find them sooner or later and this will inevitably lead to the need to fight and eliminate as many enemies as possible avoiding to be killed. Traders can either shoot on any model they can see or move closer to attack them in hand to hand combat. In each case, every attack costs an action and the outcome is performed by rolling a number of dice and then summing up the number of “Hit” icons. Cover and armour will then both reduce the number of hits by one to determine how many wounds are inflicted to the target of the attack. As this applies to both the Traders and the enemies, it is important to consider carefully the position of your Trader and your enemy before attacking as some weapons will never be able to deal enough damages to wound a target with armour and cover bonuses.
When attacking or defending, players should also consider the Special abilities of their Characters and this also applies to the First Born models. Specifically, a Knowledge dice should be added to the first attack a First Born makes every turn to boost it with a special effect. This ability does not apply to the Drones and it can be used for two attacks every turn once the Hostility tracker reaches the “Cleanse” phase.
Last but not least, every time a Trader shoots with a weapon, the player should remove a ammunition peg from their Character board. If this was the first time a round was shot in the Trader phase, the gold peg should also be added to the Hostility tracker increasing its level.
Ending the game: how to win
Once the First Born phase is completed a new round starts again from the Hostility Phase and the game continues until the players either escape to their ship or they are all defeated. Some missions will also have specific objectives the Traders need to complete before they can escape while some others will have optional/additional ones that will help increase the reward for the survivors.
It is always important to remind that Traders main objective is to survive, grab the loot, complete objectives for their reward, and escape to the ship as soon as possible. Remembering this credo is important when playing a mission but it becomes critical if you are playing a campaign as every credit you collect after a mission can help your team become stronger to face the next challenge.
Luckily, Core Space: First Born rulebook also includes some good recommendations in order to help new players to strategize. Some of these suggestions should not be taken lightly including the most important one: do not split your team. Sending Traders in different part of the map seems a great idea when the threat of the First Born is minimum but things can suddenly change and your Traders may find themselves isolated and at the mercy of the enemy. I honestly made this mistake a couple of times in my first games and I always end up regretting it. The best way to maximize your team efficacy is to prepare a clear strategy and move your Traders to achieve your goal. At the same time, you should always be ready to escape disregarding if you have or not fulfilled all your goals. Remember the credo, if you survive you can always come back!
