The Future of Ird
Well, they had a nice run, but the future of Ird is pretty bleak. The First Wave Colonies have now been established for over a century, and are looking to explore the star systems around them for resources and colonizable worlds.
In New League Traders, you take on the role of a Trading Company sponsored by one of the First Wave Colonies - the first settlements established by the Volke of Ird on other worlds in neighboring star systems. Using advanced LosTec orbital factories, your company will explore and exploit the space around them.
Each map tile represents part of a star system, and they must be arranged so that the orange parts match up to show the star in that system. You don’t have to finish scouting a given system, but it costs more of your Star Charts to explore new systems, and more resources to expand into them.
In the image above, Neuhafn is the sponsoring First Wave Colony, which at this point of stellar expansion, represents the largest settlement outside of Ird. To the left is the Player’s HQ - their orbital factory. The other two Sectors of that System have been explored (403, and 709, numbers that just tell us which kinds of resources they have when we shuffle the deck so it can stay semi-secret and semi-random), and a Colony has been built in 403, which has been upgraded to Tier 2! Colonies use up a LOT of resources, but they are the primary source of workers you will use to staff your Extractors and Harvestors floating in space and netting you Resources and Trade Goods!
Speaking of Resources and Trade Goods, those are tracked on these side boards for each player.
The top one has a description of your First Wave Colony (cut off in this lovely picture), which several resource banks and tracks. The counters represent that total number available, and the number tracks show how much you earn each round (those numbers can go up and down depending on what you build, so you need enough “levels” to sacrifice some for larger projects). Workers, Amenities, and Power have a track at the top because they only have levels available, not discrete tokens to spend.
The grid at the bottom is the available space in your orbital factory, where you will build advanced machinery to process and combine Trade Goods harvested from space into fancy Exotic Products. Trade Goods and Exotic Products can be sold back to the First Wave Colonies for lots of Credits, and you also get a boost to Amenities each time you acquire a new type of Trade Goods (not Exotic Products, though, as those are just for export and profit).
Next time we will start to dive into the backstory of the sponsoring First Wave Colonies and how we ended up in space!
