The bizarrely named Moose with Cup Creative, are Kickstarting their first game, SCUM: An Eclipse Board Game, based on the Eclipse Phase RPG. In the Eclipse universe, you are a transhuman, able to transfer your consciousness into new bodies, battling threats against humanity; and as you’d expect, these themes come through in the board game.
The publisher’s blurb reads: ‘You are Scum. A collection of rabble-rousing, freedom-loving, hard-partying anarchists who live in the outer reaches of our solar system upon a swarm of spaceships that swirl around a revitalized habitat known as Popping Wheelies. Life is great out here; rules are few, governments and corporations have no say, and your
reputation is the only currency that matters. But recently, you have made a terrible discovery. A sinister conspiracy is in the works to obliterate your home and end the party for good. Manipulating your rep, commanding your AI muse, and calling in favors with the denizens of the Scum swarm, you must uncover the mastermind behind the plot and hatch a crazy plan to defeat them before the multiplying threats unleashed upon the swarm overwhelm it and force the unthinkable.’
In this semi-cooperative 1–4 player game, you strive to uncover and defeat the Mastermind, while maximising your own score. A neat twist is that you can sneakily throw the other players under the bus (space bus?) and align with the forces of evil, though presumably not in the solo game (the early version of the rulebook available currently doesn’t mention solo play).
Each turn has several phases: first, you make use of the AI embedded in your brain by playing a Muse card from your hand, gaining an immediate benefit or gambling on a (larger) future one as the result of another player’s action. Then, move to a new ship—the playing area consists of four spaceships (‘swarm tiles’) and the larger space station, Popping Wheelies; you have to move to a different ship on your turn, where you can gain resources or acquire equipment. After this, you must increase the ‘threat level’ by placing threat cubes on other swarms’ threat cards—more on those later. Next comes the ‘engage phase’ in which you perform two engage actions, which are essentially benefit purchase options, one of which is to remove threat cubes before the threat level is too high. You can optionally take an ‘assist’ action, where you place a ‘favour cube’ to benefit other players—actually, to benefit all players, since these actions will (usually) help keep the Mastermind at bay—or take a favour cube to perform another action, such as ‘investigate’ (discover more about the Mastermind). Along the way, you’ll be able to draw more Scum cards, most of which are beneficial, but some are yet more threats. Finally, at turn end, you can claim ‘objectives’ (at a cost of ‘reputation’) and deal with threats that have crossed the threshold.
I’ve mentioned threats a few times… There is a relatively small number of threat cubes, and running out of them means game over, loser. As mentioned, during play, threat cubes move from the general pool onto swarms, and players can take steps to move them back. If a card’s threat level is too high at the end of a turn, that threat is replaced with a new one and any cubes on it are placed in a separate ‘lockdown’ pool, inaccessible to players. Once the Mastermind card has been revealed, threat cubes are taken from that lockdown pool, and once again, no cubes left means game over, so there’s a fun interaction between avoiding threats but also triggering enough to satisfy the Mastermind’s needs.
The game ends when the required number of objectives have been achieved, with the winner being based on ‘renown’ scores, or when threat cubes have run out, in which case either all players lose, or the traitorous player who’s got and is able to play the Betray card wins.
Scum has a lot of interesting mechanics, and two of my favourite are: you normally take actions on whichever ship you happen to be on, but you can also use the Mesh to digitally move from one ship to another, but this has a randomly assigned cost in the form of ‘glitches.’ Second, when Scum cards are used, they are placed on a discard pile, unless they’re threat cards, in which case they’re placed at the bottom of the card draw deck, meaning threats will come thicker and faster as the game progresses.
This is a nicely themed game with a heap of brightly coloured components. The player tokens are neat 3d models, though I have to confess I tend to shy away from games with detailed minis—I always feel I’m being forced to pay more for pretty components than gameplay, but there’s so much here that perhaps that’s less of an issue. I like the mix of possible actions and the collection of characters you interact with, but I do worry that there are many possibilities that progress might end up feeling a bit arbitrary.
You can find out more at the project’s Kickstarter page, still open at time of writing.
Note: this was based on preview material—the final game may differ in some details.
About the Author:
When not playing boardgames or blogging about them, L.N. Hunter keeps himself occupied writing fiction: a comic fantasy novel, The Feather and the Lamp, sits alongside close to 100 short stories in various magazines and anthologies, and on websites and podcasts (see https://linktr.ee/L.N.Hunter for a full list). L.N. occasionally masquerades as a software developer or can be found unwinding in a disorganised home in Carlisle, UK, along with two cats and a soulmate.
