Exploring New Horizons

Exploring New Horizons

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 WhirlwindLiam “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

2 Comments
  1. I’ve found that Primary Cards in card games (Big Effects Cards that you build a deck around) – Ship cards in Traveller – that do not seem easily intuitive, bring out the best (or worst depending on your perspective) in deck builders… I remember in MTG when Necropotence came out and nobody could figure out how to use it… then the killer Necro decks hit the Tours and found everybody scrambling to make a competitive deck that could stop Necro! I predict SAFARI will go through a trial period and somebody will discover a killer combo to go with it….

  2. This reminds me of the old Duelist suggested decklists. Brings back memories. And the Safari ship is not the POD I was most excited about. However, as a solo player, it is the one I think has the most diverse options for solo.

    This was a cool brainstorm article.

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