First off, greetings all - been here many time but have never posted. This weekend, our usual game play did not go as planned and we ended up with 2 players so here is what we hammered out:

2 players, 2 races apiece played as "allies" as follows - 1 Trade Agreement is given to the other race each player controlled, these were static for the entire game. Each race drew its own Strategy, Action and Objectives as necessary and could not swap outside of the normal restrictions of the game… Political cards were not used. Races can pass through an ally-occupied map tile but not end their movement there. We sifted through the races and picked what we felt to be the 10 races most likely to win in a combat-oriented game, dealt 4 to each player to choose 2 each. One side ended up with the Ghosts of Creuss and Yssaril on one side and the Mentak and the Arborec on the other.

Strategy Cards used were Leadership, Diplomacy II, Logistics, Warfare II, Technology II, Bureaucracy… with the following adaptations: The Logistics Primary was changed to read " Gain 2 Trade Good, then all players then receive Trade Good for existing Trade Agreements. You may then build at your existing Space Docks, building units here does not activate the system(s) ." Secondary was unchanged. If you took Bureaucracy you would get the Speaker Token and the Primary was changed to read: " Receive one Command Counter and one Trade Good. You may then qualify for one Public Objective that you qualify for. " Secondary was changed to read " Spend one Command Counter to receive two Trade Goods and one Action Card ." Purchasing tech with primary or secondary was amended with " if this tech was researched by your ally on a previous turn, it costs 2 less for you to research "

This would be a good time to mention that we actually LIKE Distant Suns. Love it, actually. This time, we played all options from all 3 releases except Mercenaries, Accelerated Setup, Premade Map and anything associated with the Political aspects.

We removed Abyz/Fria and Bereg/Lyrta IV tiles, doled out the rest and made an extended 3-ring map with what I felt to be a maddening amount of red border systems and open space around Mecatol Rex and an ample supply of planets nearer the Home systems. Next we picked out 14 Public Objectives (7 Stage One and 7 Stage Two) all geared towards occupying worlds, open combat or sacrificing resources and placed them all face up with the Age of Empires rules. Then we set out for the long game…

Unfortunately, we did not finish. The Mentak/Arborec player was a couple points ahead at the end but we called it as "unfinished" and left it at that. We were interested in feedback from the forum as it was fun enough to try it again and fast paced. Occasionally we would get confused as to what Tech or Racial applied to the pieces in question but other than that we had a blast!

Thoughts?