Deck-building game, 2 players only. 3 factions: Federation, Empire and Independent. The game board has three "battle zones", winner of the game is the player who manages to dominate two of those. The types (=goals) of each battle zone are drawn from a pile of cards for variety. The zone types in the livestream were "combat" (ronseal), "hazardous extraction" (mining), and one where the goal was to transport in goods in order to build a capital ship.
Cards are mostly ships, i. e. variants of ED ships outfitted for different purposes (e.g. there's an exploration AspX card but also a mining one). Other cards types are "Outfitting" (lets you e.g. slap an HRP onto a ship) and special "Actions" you can perform.
Each round starts with the players playing cards from their hand (which they drew from their deck) into one of the three zones on the board for up to a maximum number of "build points" (=ship cost, bigger ships cost more, some also need karma points to build which every player has displayed on a bar in front of them).
Next is the action phase, in which, zone by zone, players execute different action their ships in that zone can perform, the order is determined by the "Speed" attribute of each ship. It seems you mostly attack your opponents cards trying to destroy their ships (duh). On the ship cards the different kinds of possible actions it can perform are displayed. For example, you could have the option to either do 3 fixed (=guaranteed) damage, or 1 fixed and 4 burst, meaning one fixed damage plus the outcome of four dice rolls with a 50/50 hit chance. Ships also have special effects like "absorb one point of damage" or "do xxx for 2 points of karma". Ships that have spent their action are "depleted" and rotated sideways until the next turn. Destroyed ships are removed from the game (double duh), sometimes you can also pull a ship out of the zone or even switch zones. Other than fighting, you can also perform other actions depending on the zone type. Yesterday, Will managed to do enough cargo deliveries in the build zone to construct an Interdictor, securing his victory.
Game can be preordered, you can either buy the base package and stock up with extension packs or get all currently available cards at once in the Season Box which will also be discounted for the next month. There are NO random card packs., thank god.
