Shadow's super flare lets the player replace an opponents ship with one of his own. So, does the word "replace" therefore mean that if Shadow makes an opponent lose a ship from one of that opponent's home worlds, that the Shadow then gets to immediately put a Shadow ship on that world (thereby establishing a colony)? This seems somewhat unbalanced to me given that the Shadow can play this super flare multiple times and thus win the game.

Thoughts? Are there any official errata I should know about?

Super Flares are supposed to be powerful to the level of near-absurdity; so I wouldn't be too surprised if you're supposed to replace the ship where it stands (don't have the game yet, so don't know exact wording). Think about it; there are like 60 cards in the deck, only one of which is your Super Flare. That's a 13% chance of getting the Flare in your opening hand (assuming 60 cards), which is pretty small. Factor in the fact that you can get your hand taken from you somewhat easily, and supers are hard to use for the instant win.

j2klbs said:

Freewheeling Flares has a lot of issues, I think. This is one of them. Yes, it's still pretty powerful if your reading of the flare is correct, but that's at most one more colony every turn -- at least there's a chance to stop it. I'll have to read the card though.

I'm fairly sure this is by design, and IIRC came up in a playtest. Pretty much *ANY* alien that has his Super should threaten a win in 2-3 turns. All this really means is that the other players *have* to deprive the Shadow of his Super Flare before this becomes a problem.

There are lots of ways to do it

-Card Zap

-Taking Shadow below 3 planets

-Cosmic Zap Shadow (this is only temporary, but will force Shadow to use the Wild rather than the Super version of his flare that turn)

- Compensation

And let's not even get into alien powers.

When Shadow threatens a win, the odds that *somebody* won't either zap the flare or take it from him in some other way is pretty low. Especially if a couple turns pass.

The Shadow Super Flare only works when you are on the offense. Therefore you could theoretically gain 4 colonies on one turn but not the full five to win. This is also assuming that you win both encounters of course.

This happened to us just the other day... We weren't paying attention and she won... v.v