A Completely Unbiased Review: Xia Expansion 

I would give anything for a new big box expansion that introduced a mysterious new alien quadrant with new ships and mysteries to explore.

That's great! The different scenarios that pop up through each random map layout and player ship choice really makes every game totally different. Some games shields weren't really needed because everybody was nice, while another game one player went rogue from the start and everyone had to stay as far away from him as possible until they could buy basic shields. The expansion does a great job of polishing some of the base game's rough edges.

Shut Up & Sit Down says the same thing with regard to Merchants and Marauders. I should give it a try some time! But I think I like the space theme more than ocean going either way. Enjoy the base game! It's amazing. (pro tip: look up the recommended house rule for "safety dice" in the base game)

I own M&M and the expansion I highly recommend it, great fun. It is more rigid once you decide merchant or pirate but the new expansion adds smuggling and other ways to win which makes it less rigid. Very elegant rules especially the combat system for raiding NPC ships. It's a regular house favorite here. I am thinking of getting the expansion for Xia and playing that with the base for our first play. Concerned the base game is a bit broken so I might grab it so we get the best experience from day one. Would you suggest we do that or should we play the potentially broken base game first?

The expansion is highly recommended! You can use any mix of components too. If you haven't played any games of it yet, I'd play with just the base game's tiles to get used to the play style, then add in the expansion tiles to add variety. The two main fixes in the expansion are for the movement and economy (trading), which did indeed sometimes break games. Having an optimal trade route pop up, which could happen fairly frequently, usually short-circuited our games. Movement is usually corrected for by rolling two dice and taking the higher of the two (using dice appropriate for your engine). You can adopt both the movement and economy fixes without actually buying the expansion, but I do love this expansion, with its additional ships and larger galaxy to explore.

Good advice there, much appreciated. I will try to get the expansion if possible as it looks so cool, especially the ice crystals that spread! Good tip on the movement, how did you fix the economy? That is a big concern for me as most of our players love trading and often win M&M by being merchants.

The expansion rulebook is available on the Far Off Games website here: www.faroffgames.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Xia_Embers_Rulebook_web.pdf In there, you can head to page 3 for the economy board rules. You don't really need the physical economy board, the general idea is just that you set aside a small supply of each resource type at the beginning of the game, rolling the D6 die to decide how many of each colour is available for purchase. From then on, new cubes are created when selling other cubes (the created cube match what the planet sells). So selling one colour will produce a different colour. There can never be more than 6 cubes available (though you can still sell more) and if a colour is ever completely out of stock, put a coin there to indicate it is in demand. Anyone producing that colour cube gets the coin as well. This prevents out of control trades between two planets that buy/sell each other's colour. The cubes of those colours will immediately run out, forcing you to head to other planets to get the supply back again.

Fantastic! It's a fantastic game and so exciting to discover a new best game after childhood.

You've outed my Canadianness! Now all the meeses know where to find me.

Thank you! It's always been tricky explaining the game to people when you can't even say the name.