A Billion Suns: 2. Edition Ankündigung

Mike Hutchinson plant eine neue Edition seines Weltraumspiels A Billion Suns, die im Sommer 2026 veröffentlicht werden soll.

Geplant ist ein Redesign der Regeln mit besserem Layout und einfacheren Spielmodi.

The first edition of A Billion Suns has a really neat combat system and a really novel and bizarre interlocking army-list/deployment/objective system that I’m really proud of. However, the game can appear quite intimidating to a new player. Even though the core of the game system is quite simple, four things provide barriers to the fun: the lack of list building, the dense “core systems” game mode (with its triple objectives), the on-the-fly buy-what-you-want gameplay, and the ugly layout of the book.

Lots of people come to the game expecting to find a spaceship battle game, so they can smash fleets of battleships together and watch them boil into the vacuum of space. There is plenty of combat in A Billion Suns, but it is very deliberately in service of the real core objective of the game which is the economy. If you want to smash spaceships together, the first edition of A Billion Suns doesn’t provide a direct way of achieving that.

With ABS2, I want to make the game more approachable for new players, while also offering more and deeper gameplay to existing players.

I want new players to find a simple and intuitive spaceship battle game, with generic unit types, cool combat and command systems, simple objectives and scenarios, and enough faction asymmetry to provide replayability. I want them to be able to paint some spaceships and light each other up, without an economics degree. However, I also want to cherish the bizarre and twisted heart of the game, and show respect to those players that have achieved ABS enlightenment by maintaining the economic game as an ‘expert’ way to play the game.

Das Buch wird ein Hardcover werden

The new edition will be a stand-alone hardback, and that means it gets its own bespoke layout and graphic design. I’m particularly excited to see this game get laid out again, with a less limited page count and more space to breathe. The layout of the blue book version of A Billion Suns is definitely somewhat responsible for the difficulty for new players to grok the game on first reading. Some of the spreads in the book (like pages 24-25 for example) make the game seem more dense and confusing, where a more spacious layout would have made it seem methodical and logical.

Einige Änderungen kündigt Mike bereits an:

Having said that, there are a few small areas in the core game system I plan on simplifying or tidying, (and I’d love to hear your wishlist of these too). Top of my list are:

• Simplify/removing battlegroups
• Allow ships to pivot once at any point during movement, instead at just the start
• Bump most ranges up by an inch to give everything more breathing space
• Remove destruction of jump points and jump shock
• Folding orders and commands into the same system
• Decouple the Jump Step and CMD tokens

Quelle: Planet Smasher Games