Nosnhoj Kräm
Canada
St.John's
Newfoundland
“Brothers, oh brothers, my days here are done, the Dornishman’s taken my life, But what does it matter, for all men must die, and I’ve tasted the Dornishman’s wife!”
"Oak and iron guard me well, or else I'm dead and doomed to hell." - Andal proverb.
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Imp
You have the power of Trickery. As long as you are not a main player or ally, before encounter cards are revealed you may use this power to discard either the offenses or defenses Encounter card. Then, you place an Encounter card from your hand face-down in it's place.
As long as you are not a main player or ally, when Reinforcement cards are played use this power to choose whether it benefits the offense or defense.
Flare
Wild: At the beginning of your Regroup Phase you may force all other players to discard a card at random from their hand.
Super: You may use your power as an ally.
Thoughts: Hmm, I guess this alien power could have been called Kingmaker, having the power of Preference... but I would have the wild effect do something different if he was called Kingmaker.
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Utopia
You have the power of Isolation. Whenever you gain a foreign colony, use this power. Place a planet of your choice where you have a colony onto your sheet. Planets and ships on your sheet are considered isolated. Isolated planets and ships may never be removed from your sheet or moved around for any reason. Isolated planets will still provide home colonies and foreign colonies based on who owns the planet and the ships upon them.
When 4 planets have become isolated you have created the perfect society and the game immediately ends. The player with the most isolated ships wins the game with you. In the case of a tie or you having the most ships isolated, you are considered the sole winner of the game.
Utopia and Masochist may not be used in the same game.
Flare
Wild: At the start of your regroup phase, shuffle this flare card in the Cosmic deck to have all players discard their hand of cards. Then each player draws a hand of 8 cards from the Cosmic deck.
Super: If the game ends due to having 4 planets isolated and you have this flare in your hand, you may declare yourself as the sole winner of the game.
Thoughts: I'm worried there is not enough incentive for people to help Utopia win encounters. It does provide permanent protection for foreign colonies and it can help combat against certain powers (Leviathan and Disease come to mind) but I'm not sure people would want to have their ships tied up for the remainder of the game. I did have it as 5 planets, but 5 foreign colonies means game over and Utopia would win, possibly with other people regardless of isolating planets. Utopia was meant as an alt-win alien. Needing one less foreign colony to win might be too much... there was a lot of back and forth on what to do with Utopia but Imp was rather easy to come up with.
Any of your comments and questions would be more than welcome 
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Wow... I never thought of Utopia... But I like it!!! It's a perfect way to use the new FFG planets.
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As much as I love seeing new uses for FFG's movable planet tiles, Utopia strikes me as being quite a leaky power.
* How do you keep track of which system an isolated planet came from? Planet color is insufficient because effects like The Claw and Wild Leviathan can cause a planet to be in a system other than the one its color would suggest. And asking players to remember something like that for so long seems inconsistent with the game's general design philosophy of making memory unnecessary to resolve effects (to the point of including Grudge Tokens).
* This removes players' ships from circulation permanently, which means it can reduce a player to having fewer than five ships left, making it impossible for that player to win the game. This is compounded by the fact that you haven't defined ships on isolated planets as "removed from the game" at all, which means effects like the Void that normally remove ships from the game won't notice that those ships are effectively already gone when counting how many ships they're allowed to remove - so put this and Void in the same game, and it's easy for the game to become unwinnable for somebody (which was clearly not an intended design decision, hence the Void having the no-reducing-below-five clause in the first place).
* Conversely, defining these removed ships as being "lost" could remove the Do Not Use With Masochist stamp. (Well, aside from the fact that really the Masochist should never be used in general.)
* The power doesn't specify that removed colonies still count even if the Utopia's power is lost (compare the text of Locust), so if the Utopia's been isolating its foreign colonies to protect them, it will lose them all if it ever runs low on home colonies.
* The power... just doesn't do that much in general. It lets you keep the foreign colonies you already have, which I suppose is helpful against a handful of powers (Shadow, Bully, Hate, Saboteur, Filth, and maybe Will and The Claw), but it's a pretty short list. And then it lets you win the game when you get your fifth foreign colony... which, again in games without significant colony destruction like those powers above, is true of everybody else (and a single Cosmic Zap can derail this anyhow by forcing you to get six foreign colonies before winning). Sure, it lets you remove some of your opponents' ships from the game... but doing so will hand them a win alongside you. And since you remove the planets immediately when you gain the foreign colony, you're likely to be removing four of your own ships in the process. The power is very strongly reminiscent of Locust, and inherits its problem of not actually doing very much.
* Ironically, as a result of those last two points, the best way to use this power is possibly to have home colonies where your opponents have foreign colonies (as a result of deals, Wild Spiff, etc), then remove those planets from the game, and then Cosmic Zap yourself. While your power is turned off, your removed home colonies don't count, so you don't have three home colonies, so your alien sheet flips face-down and your power never turns back on - and your opponents' removed foreign colonies are gone forever. And at that point, this is just the Filth with several nerfs tacked on.
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Unfortunately I believe Imp already exists as the Mayfair power called "Busybody", which REALLY needs to find its way into an expansion.
Though your version can interfere without repercussions, it doesn't gain the discarded card. Otherwise its the exact same idea.
As for Utopia I don't really have a comment, but it does remind me of Locust.
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Nosnhoj Kräm
Canada
St.John's
Newfoundland
“Brothers, oh brothers, my days here are done, the Dornishman’s taken my life, But what does it matter, for all men must die, and I’ve tasted the Dornishman’s wife!”
"Oak and iron guard me well, or else I'm dead and doomed to hell." - Andal proverb.
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Yeah, Busybody is very similar. I'm not familiar with any of the old powers!
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Shemp Fill-in: Chan?
United States
Fountain Valley
California
Which way did I go?
Pick a card.
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What good does Imp's power do for it? Well, it's a more powerful version of Philanthropist, you cause the player to discard the card he wanted to play, and play your worst card instead. And of course you'd always do this to the offensive player so that no one can ever gain a colony except you. And you win your encounters pretty easily, since you get rid of all your worst cards. The only drawback is that you can't ally. But so what? As long as you're patient enough to wait for your own turns, you win, since all other players will be playing N's and low Attacks on their turns.
Imp is not like Busybody. Busybody is rewarded for helping the side he interferes with to win, and penalized if that side loses.
Utopia also seems sort of like Gorgon. You isolate planets where other people have colonies along with you (so long as their total isn't more than yours), and then you just need four colonies to win. And you'll always have the most isolated ships because you're choosing the planets. For the first three, you just choose three of your home planets so that you never lose your power. Then you win on the fourth one. But of course, other players will react to this power by never allying with you or inviting you to ally on offense. So you'll have to gain all your foreign colonies solo.
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More rules questions: Filch draws the Relic's color in Destiny, attacks, wins, and takes over a planet there. Utopia draws the Relic's color in Destiny, points the cone at the planet the Filth is on, attacks, wins, and attempts to isolate that planet. What happens? Does the Filth force the Utopia off the planet before it can be isolated? Does the Utopia get sent home but the planet get isolated with the Filth alone on it? Does the Utopia isolate the planet before it can be forced off (at which point it can't be forced off because ships can't be removed from isolated planets)? If so, is the Filth considered to be constantly using its power in a futile attempt to send the Utopia home (allowing the Filth to, for example, Cosmic Zap itself at any time, in order to force its allies to land on a planet with it instead of scattering or in order to play the Wild Filth)?
Considering that the Filth is one of the only about a half-dozen Colony-removing powers that make the Utopia actually matter, a rules conflict with it is a serious issue.
Phil Fleischmann wrote: Utopia also seems sort of like Gorgon.
Specifically, a Gorgon that immobilizes its own ships in addition to those of its victims.
Phil Fleischmann wrote: You isolate planets where other people have colonies along with you (so long as their total isn't more than yours), and then you just need four colonies to win.
This is a new addition since my post, and not one I can say I like. "It gets you one foreign colony over the course of the game" is often used as a benchmark for how good a power ought to be, but "You win with four foreign colonies" is a really lousy power on it's own. The problem is that it's boring to play, and, more importantly, it's weak. From everyone else's perspective, you start with your first foreign colony at Game Setup. But the first foreign colony is easy to get; it's the fifth that is met with strong resistance. So the diplomatic element will nullify the power immediately.
But we already had a big discussion about this in the Gith topic, so I don't really want to go too far into all that again. The gist is that in general, "You win with four foreign colonies instead of five" is not a good idea. The Gith at least can be excused as having an excellent flavor reason (it actually uses something as a physical colony elsewhere); the Utopia has no such excuse.
Phil Fleischmann wrote: And you'll always have the most isolated ships because you're choosing the planets.
Which means you'll always have the fewest ships available to use in the game.
Phil Fleischmann wrote: For the first three, you just choose three of your home planets so that you never lose your power. Then you win on the fourth one.
Careful - a single Cosmic Zap, and those home colonies temporarily aren't home colonies for you, which means you lose your power permanently.
Of course, when your power is "use this power when you get a foreign colony, you win after four uses", a single Cosmic Zap is already basically going to turn it into the non-power that is "You win with five foreign colonies".
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Shemp Fill-in: Chan?
United States
Fountain Valley
California
Which way did I go?
Pick a card.
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salty53 wrote: Phil Fleischmann wrote: And you'll always have the most isolated ships because you're choosing the planets. Which means you'll always have the fewest ships available to use in the game.
Well, if you win the game, who cares? Meanwhile, you'll have 17 freely-movable ships and 3 isolated ships that hold onto your power so you can never lose it.
Quote: Phil Fleischmann wrote: For the first three, you just choose three of your home planets so that you never lose your power. Then you win on the fourth one. Careful - a single Cosmic Zap, and those home colonies temporarily aren't home colonies for you, which means you lose your power permanently.
How so? "Isolated planets still provide home colonies" is not a use clause. A zap just means you can't isolate a new planet when you gain a foreign colony. It doesn't do anything to the planets you've already isolated.
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Phil Fleischmann wrote: How so? "Isolated planets still provide home colonies" is not a use clause. A zap just means you can't isolate a new planet when you gain a foreign colony. It doesn't do anything to the planets you've already isolated.
Zaps can only be used in response to use clauses, but they shut off non-use portions of the power as well. If the Fury gets Plagued and then Zapped when it tries to get tokens for the lost ships, it can't spend the tokens it already has later in that same encounter, even though doing so is not a use clause. Anything loss of home colonies shuts down is also shut down (albeit temporarily) by a Zap.
There are exceptions that can't be shut down, whether by Zaps or home colony loss - Bill differentiates these from standard "Non-zappable" effects under the label "Automatic" - but Utopia doesn't seem to imply to me that it is indeed supposed to have its colony effect still apply while the power is turned off. Basic analogy to the extremely similar Locust implies that the colony effect does not continue to apply while the Utopia's power is lost, since the Locust has a clause stating that devoured planets count as foreign colonies even if the power is lost, but Utopia has no such clause, which suggests that Utopia works differently.
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“Brothers, oh brothers, my days here are done, the Dornishman’s taken my life, But what does it matter, for all men must die, and I’ve tasted the Dornishman’s wife!”
