One of my goals this year was to design a game or a mod for an existing game.  This year, I decided to get back to poking at Breach: Starship Duels.  Right about the time I got my first 3D printer, I discovered Breach and this was the game that really made me say, “Yes, this has to happen”.  Over the years, I’ve printed multiple copies of Breach, and this year I decided I was going to print a copy for myself and add the ideas that were bouncing around in my head.

What I was able to create from this effort was two small expansions: Breach: Pirates and Planets and Breach: Dying Suns.

Breach: Pirates and Planets

I have been working on Breach: Pirates and Planets for a few years, but I always ended up just shy of putting the finishing touches on it.  My goal with Pirates and Planets was two-fold: adding some tactical risk to the environment and adding the ability for a slingshot maneuver to the game.

First, I wanted was to add an element of tactical risk to the game.  With the pirate stations specifically, I wanted someone to have to ask themselves, “to make this work, I may risk taking damage, is it worth it?”  The idea here was that there may be a path short enough to accomplish your goal, but you may have to take a shot from a pirate to do it.  I also liked that these were a bit of a flip-side compared to the repair stations, and borrowed rules from that expansion to figure out how they interact with the rest of the game.

Planets was more of a guilty pleasure than a mechanics-first thinking.  I liked the idea of a ship performing a slingshot maneuver around a planet, so I wanted to find a way to make that happen.  I like the idea of being able to convert acceleration into maneuverability, but I’m not entirely convinced I got the right implementation here.  It’s “good enough”, primarily because it’s simple and reasonably intuitive, but I do want a little more risk/reward to go with it, so I may change that implementation in the future if something strikes me.

Breach: Dying Suns

I’m actually happier with Breach: Dying Suns than I am with Pirates and Planets, even though it spent far less time in development.  Thematically, Dying Suns is all about awesome stellar phenomena, and mechanically it is all about dynamic battlefields (with one exception).

Speaking of the exception, Black Holes were actually part of Pirates and Planets when I was first working on them, but, as I started to consider other stellar phenomena, it was obvious where their home should be.  I actually really like the idea with the Black Holes since they give you more map edges and keeps ramming viable on a larger map.

Both Pulsars and Supernovae add more bookkeeping to the front of each turn, but really crank up the risk of positioning on the battlefield.  We were able to mitigate the cost a little bit by using different colored dice for each pulsar, plus another different color for the supernova, and rolling them all with a player’s dice during initiative.  Still, you end up having to roll assaults if anyone is in line-of-sight of either a pulsar or supernova (which can be a lot if there are more than one of them on the table!)

Stepping back, I look at how much polish I should put on something like this.  I like that I have something solid enough that I can play it at home with my friends, with rules that are consistent with the existing base game and expansions, and understandable and navigable enough to avoid rules disputes.  I also like having nice looking components that look consistent with the game, and don’t look out of place.  But, it’s still just a homebrew expansion – does it need the polish?  Adding that polish and putting it out there means two things – it means that it’s got to be good enough to pass muster with the community and it means that it has to have all the legal and social grease to avoid my being ejected from the community.  These are the things I’m not good at, but I’ve decided to give it a try on this one and see where it goes – if I do it right, maybe it can become the first of some resume material should I ever make the leap into part-time game design.

These expansions will be available on Thingiverse soon – so stay tuned!