01 / OPPORTUNITY COST

The cost is also the move you cannot make.

Imagine holding four energy cubes. A relay costs three; moving a surveyor costs two. You can afford either action, but not both. The visible price of the relay is three cubes. Its less obvious price is the information that the surveyor would have revealed.

Before choosing, name your next two needs. If the network must be complete this round, the relay may be urgent. If a dangerous route will shape several later turns, information may be more valuable. Neither choice is automatically correct without that context.

Try it at the table

Before a move, say what you are choosing and what you are postponing. Keep the explanation to one sentence so the exercise does not slow every turn.

02 / SPATIAL TENSION

A route becomes interesting when alternatives have different costs.

Draw two paths to a planet. The first is three links long and crosses an asteroid. The second is five links long and stays clear. Give each ship five fuel and one shield. A player can now explain why either route might be useful.

Add only one change at a time. Perhaps the asteroid moves at the end of a round, or the destination awards a benefit to the first arrival. If every new rule simply punishes the same route, the decision disappears instead of becoming deeper.

  • Show the destination and each connection clearly.
  • Make the hazard predictable enough to plan around.
  • Check that a slower route can still produce a meaningful outcome.

03 / THE SUPPLY RUN

What the command console is actually checking.

The homepage exercise gives you eight energy units. Three fuel reaches the destination, three research completes a survey and two shield protects the cargo. The 3 / 3 / 2 allocation satisfies all three conditions. Other allocations expose a trade-off: a protected ship can still fail to arrive, and an efficient launch can still return with an incomplete survey.

This is a transparent teaching model. It contains no hidden dice, difficulty scaling, payment or prize. Clearing the allocation returns all eight units, so you can test another hypothesis immediately.

Try the command console

Ask a better question after the result.

Instead of asking whether the move was clever, ask which constraint shaped it. That answer can help a group understand the mechanism without turning a shared game into a performance review.