Event text is the other option when purchasing an event cards. These are more specialised uses of your cards and will generally be good ways to remove you opponents' cubes from the board, or other effects not found through your main action points. An important part of the trade off between action points and events is that if you choose to use the action points on a card, other players will have the opportunity to use that card for its event, depending on if their faction symbol is on the card. If this is a threatening prospect then you have to weigh up if you will take the less flexible event to deny it to your opponents of if you want the action points badly enough to give away some tempo.

The last thing you can do with the event cards is pay a victory point to save them for later use, this can be a solution to how you deny thing to your opponents without wasting them yourself and also comes into play with the game’s scoring rounds.

Mixed in with the event deck are six scoring cards, they are purchased from the market in the same way and start the process of converting your board state that you built up into victory points. Choosing when to start a scoring round is an important decision and being the person to trigger it comes with a big advantage, so if it is in the expensive section of the market it might still be worth those victory points to buy. The player who starts this scoring round gets to choose which of the three regions of the board is worth bonus points this round, and this can be worth quite a leap forward if done right.

In this scoring phase there are also benefits to having some good event cards saved up as each player can play one to get a little spurt of extra board presence. This also includes the use of the iconic Corvette for hire; the Rocinante. This ship hangs out with the lowest scoring player, forming part of their fleet and letting you use the ability of one of its crew when scoring, like you would a held event card.

The name of the game in The Expanse is control, have the most cubes in each territory, nice and straight forward. Territories in the bonus region will be worth more each scoring round and each territory has one of fours resource types, each nation has preferred resources and scores a bonus for controlling these locations.

This simple victory condition, combined with the limited amount of action you can take on your turn, is a good foundation for a strong strategy game. It’s easy to see your goals and your tools but not how you use one to get to the other.