The core game is a refined, compact and intense 4X, in which 2 to 4 players fight for control of the galaxy. The asymmetry of the factions, randomness of the board layout and events and modularity of the objectives ensure a highly replayable, constantly renewed experience.
The empire board is your dual-layered control center and allow you to keep track of every aspect of your game. The components are streamlined as much as possible to create an easy to setup, focused experience that lets you plan and strategize without having to worry about missing anything.
The factions fit nicely in the board to customize your empire while playing one of the 7 asymmetrical species of the game.
Ten technologies per age, split between civil and military improvements, allow you to customize your empire, reinforce your strengths and offset your weaknesses.
The compact and custom board allow all you to keep track of these valuable and limited resources (only 2 copies exist of each tech) and plan ahead on the best way to improve your efficiency.
Combat in Fractal is everything but a random affair with our tactic cards. Initiative, units composition, types of damage all come together to form a system of bluff, deduction and deception for highly dynamic battles.
The unique faction masteries, technological upgrades and elite improvements allow you to tailor your combat strategy to fit your exact vision, and reflect the current path of your empire.
Action cards play a key role in the game, both offering powerful and unique effects, but also acting as a time-limit, since each player can only trigger two cards per cycle. With highly thematic custom art on all the cards, they are at the center of your gameplay and will help you reach your objectives.
Together with mysteries, representing the buried secrets of the cosmos, they fit on their own shared board.
Six different types of sectors come together semi-randomly to form a complex tapestry of exploration and expansion. Each sector only allow a certain types of colonies, forcing you to plan ahead on your colonization efforts if you want them to help you build your imperial engine.
On top of that, random events (anomalies, obstacles, living galaxies and singularities) will make exploration dangerous, rewarding and unexpected, ensuring a different experience each time.
Objectives allow you to score victory points according to the five main paths of the game. A second special objective card is added to the mix at the beginning of the second age, complexifying the initial victory requirements.
With eight objective cards for each age, the game contains 64 different scoring combinations, ensuring that you will need to tailor your empire to fit the objectives and not the other way around, dramatically increasing replayability.
Beyond the Void is the first campaign of Fractal, using our custom legacy framework: the Aftermath. It offers a full narrative experience where every action has consequences, and where the fate of the universe will be decided by the victories and defeats and every player around the table.
Beyond the Void is a full campaign, containing more than 25 scenarios, a dozen games (minimum), a story in 3 chapters and multiple endings.
Each page features some lore, a story and a custom illustration from our artist.
All the players player will build the story together using our legacy framework: the Aftermath and compete to decide the fate of the universe in a highly replayable campaign.
Every decision you make in game allow you to score different type of victory points, spread along five main paths.
At the end of the game, a check occurs to see which type of victory points the winner (and the losers to some extent) favored.
Based on the victory conditions, the campaign will progress to the corresponding path, pushing the story not in the direction you collectively choose, but in the one decided by the Aftermath of your actions.
Each scenario has its own story, art and set of rules. The setup, rules and victory conditions will all be altered to reflect the current path you and the other players are following.
Each of the 25+ scenarios are different, with changes affecting the game and its mechanics.
The three chapters also conclude with giant modular scenarios whose setup, rules and victory conditions depend on the paths you walked to arrive there.
Pushing the galaxy in a certain direction will unlock new features for the game, in the form of 10 special modules.
These modules act as variants, adding an extra layer of rules and components to the game and reflecting the path you walked to reveal them.
They can also be used freely in the base game, further expanding the replayability of the core experience.
On top of all the other components hidden throughout the campaign, faction themselves can be expanded by unlocking new governments and masteries, pushing always further their natural asymmetry.
And if that’s not enough, 5 new factions can also be discovered, all with unique mechanics and gameplay, and all freely usable in the core experience once encountered during the campaign.
While Fractal is a solid experience at 2, 3 and 4 players, we decided we could push the game even further and develop it as a full solo game. The Automata is not just a variant or a series of tweaks to the rules, it’s a framework used to fully automate any of the core factions.
The Automata is able to automate the behavior of each of the 7 core factions of the game thanks to its own custom AI faction mats, which include some faction-specific abilities that aim to reproduce the asymmetry of the player-controlled factions.
The passive ability, action card effect and evolutive skill all come together to allow the personality of each faction to transpire in the game.
The Automata uses its own dual layer empire board, which works in a similar way to the player’s one, but is designed specifically to accommodate the Automata’s components.
It ensures a focused and streamlined experience while using the various AI cards, as everything you need to play is conveniently placed on and around a single board, for maximum efficiency and minimum headaches.
Whenever the Automata needs to recruit or advance, players can check the currently active AI behavior card, where a simple decision tree will dictate where to recruit, which units to move and where. Player agency is almost non-existent and the cards take care of 95% of the decision process.
Because these behaviors are randomly determined by the AI protocols, and change from turn to turn, they make the Automata a highly unpredictable and life-like opponent.
AI protocol cards determine the actions performed by the Automata each turn.
The discarded and active cards act as two parts of a whole unit, indicating which actions to trigger and what behavior to follow for the recruit and advance actions.
The AI protocol also syncs with the AI unit card on the empire board to handle the evolutive recruitment of units from turn to turn and cycle to cyle.
During conflict, the Automata uses AI tactics, which emulate the players’ own tactic cards.
They make similar use of initiative, unit composition and damages (or blocks) and follow the normal rules of battle.
Military technologies can also amplify their effects, and new elite cards can be added to the deck to improve it further.
The careful distribution of cards and effects simulates the game of deduction and deception that occurs during players’ battles, making the Automata a formidable and realistic opponent.
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We are proud to collaborate on this project with Boar Games Studio.
