The Safari Ship is the third print on demand ship released for the Traveller CCG.  While Gazelle introduced a non-promo vessel and Bounty Hunter introduced the first ship ability that directly gave , the Safari Ship has the greatest potential to distort play through its abilities.

Suddenly, playing requires far more thought.  Do you really want to play a  on a  a Safari Ship player is going to pursue?  Sure, if you are the Safari Ship player!

At deck construction, instead of focusing on hard for someone else to deal with, you want you can easily resolve.  And, more than any other card currently in the game, unless you’re doing some pretty interesting stuff with a Safari strategy that doesn’t pursue , the Safari Ship player wants to run a !  Gravimetric Probe Retrieval’s value is going to require a bit of set up, however There’s Always Something … can lead to crazy chains of building up Safari counters.

Outside of the special abilities, the Safari Ship is much less like other  already in print than it may appear at a glance.  Two is significantly different from two .  Lot of slots, but not many  slots.  Low , but solid .  Another not particularly suited to piracy.

The two adventure cards in the Safari pack are trying to be a bit more adventurous on the -side while providing some redundancy with the -sides.  The Resonance Caves is a good fit for the Safari Ship player, being a bit less suited to the Subsidized Merchant player due to the .  Note that “Discard” is from hand, where “Jettison” or “Disperse” would be used if removing a gear card already in play.

Star Tours is the first that only looks for skill tokens.  This can suit with a lot of slots in a general sense.   piracy decks might find it interesting as  is highly useful on offense or defense with piracy when used with cards like Tactical Display or Reap the Whirlwind.  Liam “A.I.” Simons is a common play in piracy decks for the ability to set up the infrastructure.

Rufus Bartle was more of a thematic than mechanical choice for this pack.  A hunter to guide the safari.  He may not actually be an ideal pick for with a lot of slots, but his cost means he can always be of some use.  But it’s likely the with the fewest slots that would be most interested in including him.

Precedence Highport may be expensive, but it opens up a lot of .  Not the best card for Scouts and Bounty Hunter – I could see Empress Marava liking the effect a lot.  Might even see play by Safari Ship players to complete the odd Gravimetric Probe Retrieval…