Oops, We Missed Something #2

EDIT: it was brought to my attention that the basic gun can be fired multiple times in a turn, and only the purchased weapons are restricted to once per turn.

The Battle at Kemble's Cascade

First of all, I love this game. It's a top-down spaceship shoot-em-up, with a scrolling board and waves of enemies and asteroids and a final boss that takes up multiple rows and columns. It's awesome. You buy and upgrade weapons in the shop, acquire ship mods to increase movement and energy. Energy is health, but you also spend it to overcharge, which is to take extra actions, at the cost of less health. But in this game, dying isn't the end, so a lot of the time overcharging is worthwhile. With no mods, your ship can move one space, and fire one gun once. If you overcharge by spending 1 energy, you can either move or shoot again. You can also overcharge a second time by spending 2 energy.

What We Did Wrong

I'm pretty sure it happens every time we play this, but those times are so far between, we forget. What happens is that we interpret the rules as "you can overcharge to move or shoot again" and so with our basic gun or basic engine, we move an extra space, or shoot another enemy. However, you might notice that earlier I said you can fire one gun once. Each gun can only be used once per turn. If you overcharge, you can shoot again, but only if you have a second gun to shoot.

How Do We Realize Our Mistake?

There are power-up cards in the game, and you can acquire them pretty easily. They do things like giving you more money, letting you teleport across the map, give you free victory points, and so on. But one of them says "when overcharging, you can use a gun multiple times." And despite how many power-up cards exist, someone will inevitably get this one, and then wonder why it exists, since it seems to allow you to do something you've been doing the whole time. So, they decide that revealing that they have it in order to ask about it, and everyone at the table realizes the game is slightly more difficult than they thought.

But in the End,

This game is still awesome. It only lasts so many rounds, because the board scrolls even if everyone is currently dead, you're constantly dodging "bullets" from enemy ships or other players, there are four bosses to randomly appear at the end, and you don't have nearly enough time or money to make your ship work exactly as you need it to, so you buy what you can and hope for the best. There are achievements for doing things you were going to do anyway, like purchase 2 weapons, and for things that you would never have done otherwise, like driving into part of a boss to destroy it. It's a really enjoyable adaptation of a video game into a board game. There's a reason I have a poster of the box art on my wall.

One More Thing...

It was recently brought to my attention that you can have as many ship mods and weapons as you can afford (just no duplicates), even though the player boards only have room for 4. So, that's another oversight, and I'm pretty sure we've trashed mods or weapons that weren't working out to make room for buying a new one, and we've had disputes over the timing of trashing cards.