Sidereal Confluence, or, if you want to go by its full name, Sidereal Confluence: Trading and Negotiation in the Elysian Quadrant, is a great game for groups that like negotiations and engine building.
So what it is about? Let’s say Sidereal Confluence is like Chinatown, but in space, with asymmetrical symbiotic factions, tableau building, and loads of replayability. Or Twilight Imperium, but with no area control, no combat, and no dice. Maybe I should just describe the game on its own merit, but to be honest, Chinatown x Twilight Imperium was exactly my feeling while playing Sidereal Confluence.
The game is played through a number of rounds depending on the number of players, and they can accommodate a lot of players, 9 at the maximum. Each player will play as one distinctive faction. Each round includes the following phases:
- Trade:
- Trading with other players: You can trade anything except for victory points. All trades are binding, and you can even make deals for future trades.
- Running violet converters: Those are basically to get more engines into play to use in the economy phase.
- Inventing technologies: These are special violet converters that give you new technologies and loads of points. The tech is exclusive to you for one round, then everyone will have it.
- Economy:
- Running white converters: Those are engines to help you convert resources to more resources.
- Confluence:
- Getting access to technologies inventing by other players
- Bidding for colonies and the right to research new technologies. Colonies are another type of white converters that are required as resources to upgrades some other converters.
The rules are simple, and the complexity mainly comes from, firstly, understanding the nine different factions and their symbiotic relationships and, secondly, the interactions between players.
The first aspect is kind of like Root or Twilight Imperium. The shared knowledge to know how to play the game is very minimal, but understanding the game economy and how to take advantages of not just yours but also others’ abilities are crucial and will take many plays.
The second aspect is very similar to Chinatown, but amping up by a whole lot. It’s very beneficial that the designers have included the basic exchange rates for the resources in the game, and the converters also tell you how much you gain per conversions (like 3 to 5 1/2).
Together, the game creates a unique experience of a competitive economic game that requires a lot of cooperation. The game even helpfully points out potential allies for each faction. One person’s junk can be another treasure so mutual benefits are the key to win the game. There is no way to create a win-lose situation. It must be win-win, you just have to try to win slightly more.
As an engine builder, Sidereal Confluence succeeds the most in creating a very satisfying feedback loop with postive reinforcements on your engine at every phase of the game.
- Trade allows you to get rid of what you don’t and get what you need to run your economy, as well as expanding your economy and getting new engines into play. So trade helps with both mitigating and fixing the problems of your current economy. This is where the asymmetrical factions shine the most, since overall every faction is good at producing something and bad at others, while most requires a bit of everything to run their engines well. So no faction can prosper by themselves without trading.
- Economy allows you to get richer from your engine, and being rich means you are more powerful in the next trading phase. And of course, getting richer feels good, especially when the results are very apparent in front of you by your ability to convert a lot of cubes into a lot more cubes. Or, if you like doing the maths, from your ability to convert 3 points worth of cubes to 4.5 points worth in your first round to like 10 points to 20 points in the last round.
- Confluence opens the gate of possibilities on how to become even richer and more efficient by giving you access to new engines (planets/technologies). Winning a bidding war for the colony or the technology you want feels good. And bidding isn’t too tight, so you might not get exactly what you want, but if you are careful, you always are able to get at least something. And any “something” is good in this game, because you can always trade.
Each part of the loop gives you different ways to feel satisfied and each phase makes the other phases better. Thanks to trading, the economy phase doesn’t produce things you don’t need since any exceed just means more negotiation power during the trade phase. Confluence fixes the economy by getting converters for things you can use directly, reducing your own need to trade, and get what, it means other players will have less negotiation power over you later. And things that are missing running your own little economy are fixed altogether by negotiating with others in the trade phase.
A few drawbacks of SC would be:
- It depends on the group: This is an inherent part of a game that relies a lot on negotiation and SC also comes with a bidding war on top of that. So I can imagine the gaming experience will vary a lot or even with different meta depending on the groups you play with.
- It doesn’t look accessible: The game is not complicated, but it looks very daunting. It is mostly language independent, but you won’t be able to tell from the look of it. I know many groups who would enjoy this type of game, but wouldn’t be able to look past this facade.
- Negotiations are a big part of the game: It’s not an actual drawback of the game, but for me who spends 75% of my time at work negotiating with different stakeholders to seek win-win situations, negotiations in game just hit too close to work for me to enjoy it. I can imagine it’s not for people who don’t like negotiations and talking too much too.
I enjoyed Sidereal Confluence: Trading and Negotiation in the Elysian Quadrant more than I thought I would and would recommend it for any fan of negotiation and economic games.
Played once at 6p and another time at 7p. Took about 2.5hrs each both time