Lander: After The Crash offers free rulebook now (and UKGE demo) as Intrepid Games returns

Accidently cruelly, Kickstarter gave the original Lander a “Project We Love” just after Intrepid Games cancelled the crowdfunding campaign.

The designers have spent 10 years on the project, clearly got a lot right, if not everything, and then, just before COVID and lockdown upended the world, had a Kickstarter which they describe as “crashed and burned”.

Intrepid Games, as evidenced by their ongoing updates in Facebook and social, kept going. Now Lander: After the Crash is due to launch on Kickstarter on September.

Is September aaages away? Well, there’s already hundreds of notes of interest on the Kickstarter launch page, a free to download rulebook for the game and, right now, Intrepid Games is at GameLand’s stand (the manufacturer) at Hall 1 #631 at UK Games Expo.

I asked the team for a few hundred words about the game.

LANDER is set in the not too distant future, where governmental inaction on climate change has resulted in humankind desperately seeking a new world to call home. After the discovery of the planet Kaimas, found to have water on its surface, and being only 29.2 light years away, several powerful corporations rise to prominence to create a spaceship to get us there. In 2092, the GCC Intrepid departs Earth, with 5,000 pioneers aboard. However, a small team of scientists, engineers and operations staff are assigned the mission to establish a beach-head colony base and a forward landing craft is launched from the main colony ship.

As the lander enters the planet’s atmosphere its navigation sensors are knocked offline in a severe storm and the ship suffers a terrible crash. Many of the crew died on impact and the whole mission is in jeopardy!

Your story begins here … in LANDER: After The Crash

Idealistically, humankind should be collaborating to secure the future of our species, but the game sees you take on the role of one of the surviving corporate representatives, and you are tasked with securing the greatest spoils of this abundant new world for the corporation that invested trillions to get you here. Already these lands are being divided.

LANDER is a 1 – 4 player competitive resource management and tableau building game, where you win the game by achieving the most Mission Stars (Victory Points) over the course of 4 years, played as rounds. You will explore the world around the crash site, by placing a number of unique tiles to form the modular board and you will oversee a small crew of survivors, each with their own powerful leadership abilities. You can then develop your crew by providing them with training, or items and develop your resource base by upgrading your claimed sectors and exploring and claiming new territory.

Player interaction features prominently in the game, as you can leverage a series of Action cards which can be used to push back your rivals, or further your own interests. The decisions you will grapple with, relate to the Influence you yield within the colony. Actions which negatively impact another corporation will see you lose influence, actions which further your own interests are powerful and cost no Influence and actions which are benevolent toward other corporations will see you gain Influence. All actions can be stopped with the use of a Veto and there is a delicate balancing act to enjoy, where you can judge the relative importance of any move a player makes and decide whether you are OK for it to happen, or not.

You’ll get swept up in a myriad of scenarios, whereby you might be OK with your opponent taking one of your resource producing sectors, or killing one of your beloved crew members, but you’ll absolutely have to block their attempt to give you a valuable item. This is because the top of the Influence track (0 – 12) rewards you with one, two and four Mission Stars for finishing the game on 10, 11 or 12 Influence respectively, and it may be the case a simple 1 point of Influence gained by your opponent could be the difference between the potential win or loss for you.

The main issue here is that Influence is very hard to come by. It is easily used on such options as System Hacking any Colony Card deck, to gain absolute certainty over what you are about to acquire, to replacing your Private Mission, or Adding a Structure to your Supply Limit, or Moving a Structure already in place on the board. With a Veto costing 3 Influence, this system might see you forfeit your ability to protect yourself from perhaps terribly bad consequences. You might have the ability to kill an opponent’s crew member, that they have no Veto to stop, yet be in a position whereby you can’t afford to surrender your Influence to perform that action. Alternatively, you might enjoy rampaging death and destruction on this new world, yet in order to win, you’ll need to determine how you can translate your actions into a comparable number of Mission Stars.

Missions come in 3 types: Construction, Logistics and Research. Construction Missions require you to have achieved specific board development in order to be eligible to complete them. Logistics Missions relate to your overall crew development, whereas Research Missions require you to train a single crew member with a specific combination of class and trait requirements.

Aside from a few crew members and several Action cards that provide Influence, the only surefire way you can gain Influence is for your contribution to colony development, through the completion of Missions. Each Mission you complete provides you with a total of 1 Influence and depending on the difficulty of the criteria, will give you 1, 2, 3 or 4 stars toward achieving victory.

There is also a Performance bonus of an additional 1 Mission Star for completing 3+ Missions in the same category and, not to mention, the game also features several Accolades which reward players with Mission Stars for achieving the highest number of

board-based activities,
crew development of a certain class and
the most stars in a particular Mission category.

LANDER is therefore a game that will see you experience a rollercoaster of emotions as you plot through various trade-offs, between controlling uncertainty or the relative merits of pushing back opponents from what they’re trying to achieve versus trying to propel yourself forward toward your own aims.

If crash landing on an alien world wasn’t already bad enough, you’ll also have to contend with Events which can distort the very best made plans. You can, however, vie for the position of Colony Governor and bid your Influence to sway the collective action of the event marginally in your favour. All of this will add to the highs and lows you’ll experience as you explore and navigate the perils of this strange new world and attempt to take control of it.