Merchants of Andromeda + Bureaucrats & Anarchists Expansion

The Senate voting mechanic really shines with the expansion—it turns every turn into a tense negotiation, and the ship combat adds just the right punch when diplomacy falls apart. I’ve played three times this week and each game felt completely different.

The Senate voting mechanic is such a clever twist—it makes every bid feel like a real political gamble, and the expansion adds just the right amount of chaos to the ship combat. We’ve played four rounds in a row and the tension never dipped once.

The bidding on space goods adds some nice tension, but the rulebook is a bit of a slog to get through before your first play. We got through a game in about two hours with four players, and the ship combat feels tacked on rather than essential. It's fun enough, just not the space politics epic I was