Hello there.

Here is Alien Dominions! Take the role of an alien civilization and spread through the stars, colonize new worlds and wage war against your opponents! 

Alien Dominions is a turn-based strategy game for two or more players with a Game Master. It  uses a very simple dice-less system where players get a number of actions depending on their territory, write their turn in secret and submit it to the Master. The Master will correct the turns, determine the results of the actions and update the map. The player with a highest score after the last turn will become Supreme Lord of the Galaxy and will choose a Lieutenant as a side-winner which gives an interest in trying to be in good terms with other races. 

Despite being my latest game, Alien Dominions is a quite old one. I can trace it's origins to the 90s when I got fascinated by the videogame Masters of Orion, one of the founders of the 4X genre (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit and eXterminate). In my first year of university I joined a game that was another blast for me, Absalom, the War of the Lance, a Diplomacy-based game set in the world of Krynn of the Dragonlance novels. In this game, you took the role of one of Absalom nations (I got the Khanate of Khur) and you had to manage the resources of your territories and armies and chase certain objectives. The turns had to be hand-written (well, I type-writted a few in a pre-internet era) in one side as the blank side of the sheets were for the GMs putting notes (you conquer this, they attack you here, you produce that). The game was really fun  despite the fact that it only lasted three turns (the logistics of 10+ players) but the complexity of its rules lead me to make my own version.

The year after I created Planetas y Mazmorras, my own turn-based strategy game set in the Warhammer 40.000 universe. If was far simpler than Absalom but still full of detail and weird mechanics: planetary systems had their star type, planetary type, planetary traits, special characters, psychic powers (this part was, literally, taken from the rules of 2nd edition of Warhammer 40.000 and its supplement, Dark Millenium). Each faction had its special features plus a huge list of different technologies that gave different bonus and special rules Despite its flaws, it worked pretty well as the first game of twenty something players lasted eleven turns over two years. The game was successful enough to make me keep improving it. I made one update after another, most of them simplifying a lot. Over the years, a friend even programmed a Phyton-based-video-game version which hold the highest player count of all (thirty something spread in several countries). Eventually, by Tenth Edition, I split with the Warhammer 40.000 universe and tried to give it its own personality in even more simple systems. With the Pandemic, me and a friend created a version short enough to be played through Whatsapp where your actions where emojis (one for attack, one for defend) and the planets where in a list (you could attack anywhere). The game itself worked pretty well and, at last, I managed to solve the eternal problem of multiple combats when more than two players attack the same place (it had been haunting me since first edition) and ran a couple of games by forum showing that it was smooth enough and easy to hack and add new rules (the main one is differentiate one player from another).

So, I gave it a wash, added some pictures of great artists and here you are: Alien Dominions.

I hope you like it.