The Herald (2013)

Overview

You are Captain Sama Kollin, commander of the U.N.S. Herald, the first human spaceship capable of trans-light-speed travel. Your mission is to guide your ship in its voyage of exploration, accomplish results that repay humankind of the efforts that made the voyage possible, and come back to Earth to ignite enthusiasm for the New Frontier.

The Herald is a strategy/adventure game. Each turn you roll the five Reading Dice, and allocate them to the Chaos-Entropy Boundary Readings, which determine the next step in your journey, your ability to Resupply, the activity of the infiltrated Isolationist Cells, and the Event that unfolds in the current turn. Different die results cause different outcomes, and your choices must strike a balance between immediate needs and long-term goals.

You then choose whether to direct two of your Officers to deal with the Event, or accept the consequences of not dealing with it; Events present Opportunities that you must exploit to achieve the goals of your mission or Threats that can hinder you, and your Officers' Effectiveness decreases as they face the Challenges posed by Events.

Meanwhile, the Isolationists on Earth are trying to stop the Space Program: if you can't come back before the Final Countdown ends, you lose the game.

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The Herald is a print-and-play game that uses a Captain’s Pad and an Event Pad (both A4-/US Letter-sized); the player must supply 2 pawns, 6 tokens (small euro-discs or similar), 15 track markers (small euro-cubes or similar), and 6 six-sided dice. 24 additional tokens are required for the Linear Timeline variant of the game.

The Herald was an entry in the 2013 Solitaire Print and Play Contest.