Star Trek Voyager: Across the Unknown got a lot of criticism (and sometimes praise) at its release for how difficult it is. This actually caught me off-guard when I played, because I played the demo back in November or December, and I thought the demo was really easy. Boy did that demo not do justice to the challenge of the actual game!

I struggled a lot and had to restart the game multiple times, and save-scum sectors over and over again, in order to learn how best to approach the game's challenges. Without giving away any specific spoilers, I particularly struggled to get through sectors 4 and 5 without running out of Deuterium. These sectors are, in my opinion, the peak of the game's difficulty. If you can get through sectors 4 and 5, I think the rest of the game should be mostly downhill. That isn't to say that the remaining game is easy. It will still require careful and methodical play. But if you get past sectors 4 and 5 in relatively good condition, then you should have developed the infrastructure and techniques to give yourself enough buffer for sub-optimal play that the rest of the game will feel a lot less stressful.

With that in mind, I want to coalesce my experience with the game and offer some tips to help new players get through sectors 1 through 5, without having to necessarily go through all the trial-and-error that I had to go through. These tips will be specifically focused on the early game, and I'm going to try to avoid any specific spoilers, as this post is intended for people who are stuck in the early sectors of the game, or people who have not played the game yet, but are considering doing so. Also, please check out the full review.

Across The Unknown can be unforgiving and difficult.

I played the demo for Across the Unknown back in November or December. I was not impressed. The demo felt like little more than a dumbed-down mobile game that breezes through Wikipedia summaries of Star Trek: Voyager episodes. The demo was pitifully easy to play through, and the decisions didn't seem very impactful. The fact that you can choose to use the Caretaker's Array to go back home and end the game before it even starts seemed like a silly novelty at the time. I doubted that the actual in-game decisions could prove to be as meaningful.

But the game released, and I'm a sucker for Star Trek games. So I went ahead and bought it (it was discounted on release!). And I'll be damned if I didn't end up being just a tiny bit impressed!

Being able to use the Caretaker to go home and end the game prematurely
is the only major deviation from the show's overarching plot.

The platonic ideal of a mobile game?

Now, when I say "impressed", that comes with some huge asterisks and qualifiers! Remember, based on pre-release marketing and the demo, I was going into this game expecting a PC port of a mobile game along the lines of Star Trek: Fleet Command or Trexels. That was the measuring stick by which I was judging this game. I wasn't expecting it to be Birth of the Federation or A Final Unity.

Yes, Across the Unknown is a mobile game that was released for consoles and PC. It's like a combination of Star Trek: Fleet Command and Fallout: Shelters, except that it isn't a mobile game. Mechanically, it's almost the same, but it completely lacks any of the time and money-wasting pay-to-play grind that mobile games are built around. Yes, you do collect resources and wait for rooms on Voyager to be built. But those rooms don't take real-life hours or days to build; they take just a few in-game "cycles" (it's unclear if a "cycle" represents hours or days in the game), and are done in a matter of seconds or minutes of real time. And there are no "premium currencies" that ask you to shell out a credit card number if you don't feel like waiting for days to grind. Dilithium definitely seems like it could have been a premium currency, as it acts as a gate for higher tier technologies and room upgrades. There's no daily login bonuses. No ads. No "limited time only" promotions. It's just the raw game, stripped of everything that makes mobile gaming so obnoxious and predatory.

The blend of resource-collection and base-building will be familiar to anyone who's played a mobile game.

This is kind of the best possible version of what mobile games were promised to be, before they were completely co-opted by greedy corporations. This is not thoughtless shovel-ware designed by soulless corporations to prey on people who will compulsively through money at it. The player is constantly engaged with things to do and decisions to make. And those decisions occasionally have weight and consequence. And it all comes together to tell the coherent story of the entire Star Trek: Voyager TV show! Yeah, the individual encounters are abridged Cliff's Notes summaries of Voyager episodes, but they come together to tell an overarching story that adds up to slightly more than the sum of its parts.

For a few months in 2025, I had started thinking about making my own football board game. I was even thinking of maybe trying my hand at a Kickstarter.

I was envisioning a game board modeled after a football field, with a little football token and a little 1st down marker. The 2 players would play competing cards against each other that represented play calls, and then roll dice to determine the outcome of the play. I hadn't quite figured out how the length of a game would be determined, or the specifics of how the different play cards would play off of each other. I also had vague visions of a team-building aspect in which each player could draft a selection of "star" players on the team, who could be optionally invoked at specific times to swing a play in that team's favor.

It was all very early and conceptual.

But as far as I knew, there weren't any football board games on the market. Oh sure, there were football-themed skins of legacy board games. You know, NFL Monopoly (or the more generic NFL-Opoly), NFL-themed chess and checkers sets, and stuff like that. But I wasn't aware of any board games that were about modeling or simulating the sport of football. Well, not entirely. I did have an old VHS-based football board game, and I remember playing a pen-and-paper football game with a family friend when I was young. And of course, I was aware of Blood Bowl. But there weren't any "real", modern football board games, that I knew of. At least, I had never seen one on the shelves of any board game stores I had ever visited.

So imagine my surprise, when I was holiday shopping at Target, and I saw this game, NFL Gameday on the shelf!

I was contemplating making my own football board game before I knew these games existed.

I looked at the back of the box, and the board looked almost exactly like what I had envisioned for my hypothetical football board game. The ball and 1st down marker are even magnetic to prevent them from accidentally shifting too much during play! That's a good idea that I hadn't come up with! And low and behold, the players are playing opposing offensive and defensive play cards against each other. This looked like a simple, and possibly even more elegant version of what I was dreaming in my head. Someone had already beaten me to it.

But, as I read the rules, I realized that this game was far simpler than what I would want from a football board game. So maybe my dream game didn't quite exist yet? Or maybe it does, because while researching information about this game, I stumbled onto another game that I had never heard of before, called 1st & Goal (review coming soon!). And that game, looked like a more sophisticated version of NFL Gameday, and closer to my vision of a hypothetical dream football game.

I just had to play this game, and also try to track down a copy of 1st & Goal to see if a football board game would actually work.

If you play simulation Madden Franchises, and you take the preseason even remotely seriously, then you've probably noticed that EA hasn't changed preseason substitutions logic since the NFL shortened the preseason to 3 games instead of 4. This means that the third preseason game is still treated as the old "dress rehearsal", with the starters playing through the 3rd quarter. This is not how NFL teams play the 3rd game anymore. Now, the starters maybe play through the first quarter -- if at all. Instead, coaches now use the 3rd (and final) preseason game to field test their rookies and deep reserves before the final cut days.

But in every Madden since, the CPU leaves its starters in through the 3rd quarter. If you want to sub in your backups, you put yourself at a huge disadvantage, and their relative poor play can even result in loss of morale that can hurt their overall ratings.

Because I do take the preseason seriously as a team-development tool, the 3rd preseason game might very well be the single most infuriating thing about Madden for me. I hate it. Not only is it horribly unfair due to the talent level imbalance, if I try to sub deep reserves in early, but I swear the CPU also goes into robo / turbo mode and throws downfield every play.

Worse yet, being that I play Da Bears, I keep getting my 3rd preseason game scheduled against the Bills. Even though the Bills actually have one of the highest run percentages in the NFL, the Bills in Madden are allergic to running the ball. Now, granted, quite a few of those real-life runs are probably un-scripted scrambles by Josh Allen, but still... In any case, in my Madden preseason games, Josh Allen puts up 400 yards passing and 5 TDs in 3 quarters, and its so fucking annoying, and it makes me want to stop playing Madden altogether.

EA has provided no settings or options to change the CPU's behavior, nor mechanics for making the CPU intelligently substitute its reserves for evaluation or development, and we cant change CPU depth charts (even for "meaningless" preseason games).

As such, it always comes down to us in the community to to fix the things EA refuses to fix. Whether that be custom slider sets, disabling broken features (when possible), updating rosters to fix player ratings, or providing house rules for running Franchises. In this video, I want to share a method for forcing CPU substitutions early in the 3rd preseason game with minimal cheating.

I had first played this game a couple years ago. I mostly liked it, but never got around to reviewing it. When Paradox fired Colossal Order as the developer of Cities: Skylines II and assigned Iceflake Studios to it, I decided to go back to Surviving the Aftermath to see how well it holds up, and to give myself a better idea of whether Iceflake could handle Cities: Skylines. And since I still had all my original review notes from when I first played 2 or 3 years ago, I decided to go ahead and finish that review!

Adventures in the wasteland

Well for one thing, Surviving The Aftermath is leagues better than the other post-apocalyptic colony-builder that I played a few years ago, Atomic Societies. Aftermath largely succeeds in all the ways that Societies failed, and if given the choice between the 2, Surviving the Aftermath is the hands-down winner. About the only things that Atomic Societies does that I really missed in Surviving the Aftermath were the ability to pass laws and mandates based on various ethical dilemmas, and the ability to re-purpose old buildings and infrastructure and incorporate them into your village.

Random events will ask you to make moral or ethical decisions.

Aftermath doesn't do either of those things. but that isn't to say that Surviving the Aftermath doesn't contain plenty of ethical and moral quandaries. Surviving the Aftermath will throw various quests and random events at the player that may require you to make moral or ethical decisions. People might show up at your gate asking to be let in, and you'll have to decide whether they might pose a threat, or if your village has the resource and infrastructure capacity to support them. Other events may ask you to decide to help strangers in trouble, or to attack them and raid their supplies. All of these decisions can affect your resource supplies or influence your colony's morale.

Aftermath also puts a large emphasis on exploring and adventuring in the wasteland. In addition to managing your colony, there is an entire procedurally-generated overworld map separated into small regions. Each region may contain one or more locations that can be explored or scavenged for supplies. There may also be bandit camps for you to fight, and other villages for you to trade with. You can even set up your own distant outposts in the overworld, which can provide passive resource production, gather more colonists to add to your population, conduct research, or provide places for your adventurers to heal or drop off supplies.

It's almost like having an entire second game within the game! Trying to optimize your exploration and scavenging also creates some unique strategies, and can even influence the way that you build some infrastructure within your colony.

I was a bit disappointed that the overworld wasn't a bit more dynamic. Nobody else does anything in the overworld. Bandits from the camps don't attack or threaten your colony, any of your outposts, or any of your adventurers who happen to be in the area. Nor do they threaten or attack the NPC villages or any survivors who might be wandering around. Nope, they just sit in their camp waiting for you to attack them, which provides a small amount of supplies or silver.

Your specialists will scour the overworld for resources, and battle with bandits.

There's also no competition with the other NPC villages. They don't expand and build outposts of their own that might claim territory or resources that you want. So the whole overworld map feels very stale and static, and is basically just a giant menu for collecting supplies over time.