Kickstarter wrote:

In Spheres of Influence: Struggle for Global Supremacy players command one of the games 8 mighty factions in this modern day contest of nations. Will a mighty caliphate rise to power? Will the communist curtain fall across the world? Or will western democracy at last triumph? In games with fewer than 5 players, each player will take control of additional factions, ensuring diverse arenas of action and conquest. Players can form their own coalitions - will they make pacts resembling the Allies or Axis of World War 2 - or wholly original groupings of their own design? This also ensures that games with only a few players still fill appropriately "full" and epic.



The board in Spheres is initially empty, with factions beginning the game with only a single, semi-randomly determined territory under their control. From this territory, mighty empires will expand, but players must be careful, as their opponents race for the same prizes they do. Players must decide if they'll gamble with early colonies on other continents, make made dashes for important strategic points, deny other factions key resources, focus on oil production or regional production, consolidate their spheres of influence all at once or gradually, and whether to become early warmongers or forge lasting peace agreements. The opening moves in this game are huge, and the taking of a single oil field can have a ripple effect that permeates through the whole game.



Gameplay is divided into rounds, split into 2 phases - the mobilization phase and the turn phase. During the mobilization phase, before any combat begins, each faction will take turns placing units, eliminating any undue advantage of arbitrarily going first - when the time comes to battle, all factions will meet at their full strength. Factions place their units in order of how strong they are, with the more powerful factions placing earlier while the weaker factions place last. This gives smaller empires a way to offset their weakness by reacting to the placement of their larger, but potentially overextended, foes.



The global turn deck is also formed during the mobilization phase. Each faction contributes its 2 base turn cards plus 1 additional turn card for every oil field it controls. These cards are shuffled into a shared turn deck, made up of every factions' turn cards, and placed face down on the table.



During the turn phase, one at a time the top card of the global turn deck is revealed. That card's owner is then allowed to take a turn, choosing units on only a single space to perform an action - making them move, attack or annex an adjacent space. This unique turn structure is the heart of the game and accomplishes several things:



- Turns are very short, often lasting only 5-15 seconds, giving Spheres a very brisk and engaging pace. Players are constantly getting to do stuff, and those painfully long turns that plague other war games are virtually eliminated.



- Developments in the game are more incremental. For instance, unlike other war games, if a player wants to betray an ally, on his turn he cannot just perform an unlimited number of attacks against his former ally. Instead, after the initial turn that the betrayal plays out, its up to the the number of turn cards left in the global turn deck, and their order, that determines when the other player can react and how much time the traitor has. It also means that players can't do totally unrealistic plays, like start in Australia and end up all the way in the UK as an uninterrupted sequence of actions.



- Since the the order of still unrevealed turn cards is a mystery, the game is marked by a constant sense of suspense and urgency, with players never precisely knowing how much time they'll have to pull off a strategy before their opponents can react. This forces players to race towards goals, or to gamble on a certain dispersion of turns to pull off complex strategies.

