First exposure—A preview of prototype games from Gen Con 2024

This year, I once again had the opportunity to visit the First Exposure playtest room at Gen Con. I got to try out four different games, each at varying stages of development, ranging from early prototypes to nearly final quality. Here’s what I was able to check out!

Chrono Core TCG

The first game I was able to play had me making sure that I was in the right room! Chrono Core is a fully fleshed out trading card game about giant armored mechs fighting it out. The card quality of their preview was excellent. They even had foil promo cards.

Each player has a deck that they construct ahead of time. It will include a pilot and a core, which can be light, medium, or heavy. The pilot determines your health and has special abilities. The core always has 20 shields and some special abilities. The weight of the core determines what armor you can equip on your mech.

Each mech starts with three pieces of armor: a visor, gauntlets, and greaves, each of which must match your core’s weight class. You also start with two weapons in play. Player’s mechs are geared to go from the very start. However, they are all only level 1 components. As you play through a match you will be replacing them with higher level weapons and armor.

At the beginning of each player’s turn they get energy up to their maximum, which starts at three. You can increase your maximum energy by upgrading your armor. This will allow you to have more energy on future turns. You can also play new weapons or support equipment. While you can attack with each weapon for free, many weapons can be boosted by spending energy. Alternatively you can store some energy for defensive purposes during your opponent’s turn. The first player to reduce their opponent to 0 health wins the fight!

Despite the quality of the preview copy, the designers were still accepting input and planning to make tweaks to card layouts and keywords. Overall the game is fast and fun. Personally, I love the theme of mech combat and it nailed that for me. The art is amazing and all thematically fitting. They plan on launching a Kickstarter campaign in October. You can get more information about the game and sign up to be notified at https://chronocoretcg.com/.

Incursion Event

Unlike the previous game I had played, this one was much earlier in development. All of the components were prototypes. Incursion event is heavily inspired by the video game Into the Breach. While I had no idea of that influence when I chose to playtest this game, it is one of my all time favorite video games.

I played cooperatively with another player, each of us controlling a single mech. Thematically, we were righteous warriors in giant holy mechs fighting off invading demons from Hell. We needed to work together to defend ourselves and the buildings scattered around the battlefield. The enemies are controlled by an AI card system and we get to see what they want to do on their turn and where new ones will spawn.

We take our player turns together between enemy turns. Each player has a deck of ten cards. Two cards are played per round and there are five rounds, so all cards will be played. On our turn we get to draw three of them, put one on the bottom of the deck, and then play the other two. Each card has a top half, which is usually an attack, and a bottom half, which is usually some form of movement. You must use the top of one card and the bottom of the other. It is also possible to spend very limited energy to get additional movement.

If you manage to survive the battle, you will earn tithes based on how well you protected the city. These can be spent to increase your health or energy, and to upgrade your deck with new, more powerful cards. A campaign is three battles like this and if you survive through all three then you win!

The game was fun with interesting tactical decisions. Each of the mechs played differently and the variety of maps and card upgrades make for great replayability. The AI being run by a shuffled deck of cards makes every play through a new puzzle.

Airship Antics

Airship Antics is a cooperative party survival card game. The players are in an airship that is suffering a chain of malfunctions. Each round that the players are unable to repair the current malfunction, the airship loses 1,000 feet of altitude. The team wins by repairing all five malfunctions before crashing into the ground.

The game is played purely with cards. Each player starts with a hand of resource cards and four different action cards. Everyone simultaneously plays an action card to an adjacent player. Which direction you play changes each time a malfunction is repaired. Players then reveal the card they received and they are all performed in order from one to four. As a catch, players are not allowed to talk to each other about cards in their hand or what they plan to do.

Actions include Communicate, Salvage, Deliver, and Repair. Communicate allows that player to say up to five words. These can be anything, and often include some contents of their hand or what they would like to do. Salvage lets you draw three cards and keep two. Deliver lets you make two hidden piles of cards to offer to any player who will then take one of them from you. Repairing is how you fix the malfunction, but importantly you must have all of the required resources in your hand to do so. After everyone takes their action, they then take that action card into their hand. This means that players will have different options each round, based on the actions they’ve previously taken and passed away to others. If someone has a bunch of cards but no Repair action, then the team needs to make sure to pass them one.

So the basic game flow is players communicating who has what cards and then passing cards to a single player who can then make the repairs. In between, players are salvaging more cards for future malfunctions. There’s a lot of room for strategy and good play here, while still keeping the game fairly light. We often had funny moments when communicating when not much needed to be said. “I got this.”

In addition to the basic malfunctions we played with, the game includes advanced malfunctions to add more interesting and difficult requirements. Players are also given unique character roles to modify their abilities and strategies. Being just a deck of cards, this will be a cheap and portable game with a lot of fun potential.

NOVA: Race from the Sun

In NOVA: Race from the Sun players are competing to escape the dying solar system with the most population. The Sun has gone nova and is expanding, consuming everything left behind. The players start at Earth and need to work their way outward from planet to planet until they can escape completely. Every turn the sun consumes another planet, and if there are any players there then they are out of the game.

The actions you can take include mining for resources, researching technologies, and attempting to move to another planet. You can also attack other players to steal their resources or steal one of their technologies. The number of actions you can take in a turn depends on your current population. If your population is too low or too high, you will get less actions per turn. Getting stuck at only one action a turn can be devastating and make it very unlikely for you to escape, so there is a careful balance of not having too much population early.

Moving from planet to planet is never guaranteed. Minerals that you mine come in the form of six sided dice. Whenever you want to move you roll all your dice and must spend a certain total based on how far out you are. The more you mine early, the less dice you likely need to consume to move. But watch out as the sun is right on your heels. Failing to move causes you to lose population as well, so there is a careful balance that needs to be managed.

NOVA is a medium light game that can be played in about an hour. The basic mechanics are fairly simple, but there are dozens of different technologies which are randomized each game to keep things fresh and puzzly. There is some attacking and stealing from other players, so be prepared to make a few enemies along the way.

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