Gather your crew and prepare for adventure! In this medium weight eurogame with a steampunk setting, players send out their crew to the different sections of the board in order to explore the Delta region of Kamargo, observe mechanimals, and find more information on the crystals that power up the Perpetual Steam Engines.
2-4 players, age 12+
Playing time: 60-90 minutes
Designer: Franz Couderc
Artwork: Nastya Lehn
Publisher: Game Brewer
https://gamebrewer.com/
Delta’s Kickstarter campaign is launching on October 17:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/gamebrewer/delta-0
🧭 During each game round, every player sends out one crew member to each of the 3 sections of the game board. You gain its depicted resources, and depending on the section in which you put them, you perform different actions.
⚙️ Workshop:
Here you’ll find the engineering track, which shows how many cogs each player has. At the start of each round, when players choose turn order position and corresponding bonus, the player highest on the engineering has first pick.
The track also gives Dragonfly Reward Tiles to the first players to cross certain spaces, and victory points at the end of the game.
When players send one of their crew members accompanied by an engineer symbol, they may spend cogs to create an invention. Players take the invention tile of their choice and place it near their player board until they want to use it, e.g. to take an additional explore action.
📍 Map of the Delta:
Here players are exploring new islands to place their exploration markers. Players gain points by paying the required number of crystals shown on the island, but need to make sure they have the required number of airships and/or a pilot symbol available to make the trip from one island to the other.
Exploration not only gives you immediate points, the position of your flags also matters for some of the end-game missions and scientific papers allowing you to score extra points for them at the end of the game.
🔍 Research Library:
This is perhaps one of the most important parts of the game, because here you can gain knowledge by studying mechanimals. By removing cards in your hand from the game you advance on the four knowledge tracks, which determines how much you get for your played animal cards at the end of the game.
You might get close enough to the mechanimals and perform an in-depth study: by spending flasks you can then play the animal cards.
Finally, in the Research Library, you can also spend flasks to publish a scientific paper; these give you a personal goal to work toward and earn you endgame points depending on how well you performed.
Every round ends with a card drafting phase in which players obtain new characters, missions and animals.
💭 We found that Delta has a fairly simple ruleset, making the game easy to learn, but that certainly doesn’t mean there’s no depth to the game.
The meat of the game is that character cards are used in multiple ways: for their resources, their initiative determines the order in which players draft new cards, and you can also discard them to advance on the research tracks. This makes every part of the game connected, and every action affects what you can or cannot do later on.
🕰 Game length is around 90 minutes, which is perfect for this type of game. Turns are quick and you want to keep an eye on what your opponents are doing, so there’s little downtime.
✨ Although this is still a prototype, the components already look pretty good. And we are really impressed by the artwork, it really captures the steampunk theme.
We truly enjoyed trying out Delta and highly recommend you to check it out when Game Brewer launches the Kickstarter on October 17!
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/gamebrewer/delta-0
Tabletopping 