Aegean Sea is a complex game with fairly simple core mechanics - on most turns, you'll spend a card from your hand to take its basic action. What makes it interesting is that you sometimes have the capacity to do more than that - if you can trigger a card's special ability, you can accomplish several turns worth of actions at once! Learning how to do that, and seeing the combos in your hand is crucial to success. Aegean gives you many opportunities to be clever, and if you enjoy finding neat solutions and executing them to advance your strategy, you'll love it. It is not a game without some elements of randomness! Conflict, the cards you and your opponents draw, and the order you draw them in over the course of the game will all have effect on your options. Your job is to harness that randomness to do as many cool things as you can do - hopefully more than your opponents can manage. Like Innovation, Mottainai, and many of our other games, Aegean Sea is built with many, many plays in mind. This is a game we want you to play and enjoy dozens (or more!) times, not just a handful. With the different Customs and 220 unique card effects, you'll be puzzling out new solutions every time you play.

Aegean has significant card complexity, but we've tried to keep the core game engine as clean as possible. Our goal with designing the rulebook and the way cards are worded is to get people playing the game quickly, and letting your in-game discovery of how cards work together drive that complexity, rather than dozens of pages of rules. That being said, it's got enough complexity that we wouldn't recommend trying to onboard brand new players in full 5-player games (especially those who don't enjoy heavy/complex games) 2 player games are best for new players, to minimize downtime. This is a game you learn and internalize by playing it, more than having it explained to you beforehand.

You get the game first, and you get to support us directly and give us a good gauge on how many copies to print. We avoid gameplay exclusives because we want everyone to get the whole great game, whether they back it today or buy it five years from now.

We plan to release the game to normal distribution worldwide, after we ship out all backer orders. We estimate the price will be between $35-40, but can't finalize that until after we see production and freight costs. Those're fluctuating quite a bit right now!

The game itself is complete, and all the cards are finished. We need to finish some layout work on the box and rulebook, but hope to go to print soon after the campaign ends, in late November/early December.

My (Chris's) workflow with Carl is something I'd compare to how a writer and editor work together. Carl comes up with the raw ideas, and I help him refine them. With Aegean, that meant streamlining some effects and mechanics, figuring out optimal wording/explanation, and helping playtest to make sure everything works. It's a process we've used over the years on things like Innovation, and I think it's worked out pretty well!

At the moment, no. We welcome anyone who wants to create unofficial solo/AI variants, but our focus was on making the game work well for 2-5 players. We don't want to advertise a half-baked solo variant which would be unsatisfying!

If you bought one of the short run Beta copies available a couple years ago, there's a special $1 pledge level to back at. We'll credit you after the campaign for one copy of the game, all you'll need to pay is shipping. If you'd like additional copies, feel free to add them on! We'll collect proof of your token after the campaign.

The biggest change is a streamlining of wording, to be consistent and more understandable across all cards. For example, we've split out movement on card effects to two keywords: "Sail", which means movement following normal rules for boats, and "Zephyr", which means movement ignoring those rules - your cards are whisked away on the winds! We've also made some smaller balance changes to individual cards, but the core concepts of the game remain the same. And of course - pretty art!

Unfortuantely no - because of the way we're fulfilling this campaign, our current inventory of games is not at the same place as shipping hubs (especially internationally!). Pretty much everything in our line should be available in stores, although some distributors are a bit behind on restocking older games.