In its core gameplay, EXODE is a game of strategy, management and epic story focused on making important decisions.

The game has several game scenes, including:

1. Preparing your deck (Deck Construction),
2. Investigating more information on your crew,
3. Evacuating from starbase,
4. Scanning a new planet,
5. Colonizing your planet,
6. And living in the new galaxy, by making Away Teams, Research Teams, giving orders to your citizens, and producing and trading new assets.

The game loop actually focuses on colonization and will continue, full of decisions and events, until your colony dies, or you make it survive long enough to reach again into space and colonize other planets!

Deck Construction is the first step, and this is where you are going to use your cards.

You must place an Origin, a Ship, Officers and Crew members, and can optionally add pre-loaded cargo, passengers and equipment cards to your deck.

See Building Your Colony Deck for more details.

Once your game is started you will receive generated characters, ship and equipment. From this point, all decisions you make decide the fate of these generated assets!

This means you can risk your generated characters and generated game assets, but at the same time your permanent cards and currencies are entirely protected from any negative consequence.

See EXODE Game assets for more details about EXODE permanent and ephemeral assets.

You will begin the real gameplay once you dock to Starbase.

Once on Starbase, you must make critical (but simple) decisions to gather your crew, load fuel, fix your hyperdrive engine, and optionally save cargo and desperate passengers. This is what we call the Evacuation Gameplay.

You can actually lose your game during Evacuation! But if you succeed, your ship will get to the new galaxy… and begin the Scanning scene!

See Gameplay: Evacuation and Gameplay: Scanning for more details about the Evacuation and the Scanning scenes.

At this point the game will have generated a new unique planet for you: this planet has nearly two thousand individual attributes thanks to all its unique seasons, wildlife, vegetation, ore and minerals.

However much of this information will be unknown to you. As aliens are still after you and your ship heavily damaged from the hyperspace jump, you must hurry.

You will be able to Scan some information of your choosing from space, but after that you will have to land. Landing begins the next step of your space adventure: Colonization!

See Colonization Assets: Planets for more details about the unique planets.

Colonization is where you will play the main game loop of EXODE, which is available to all players with surviving colonies.

You will give orders to your citizens, make decisions during important events and make a strategy to decide what you should research, produce, and explore.

With time you will also unlock the trading option on your produced assets, and be able to trade them with other players, purchasing what you need in exchange for unique resources designed on your planet.

Colonization can get you further. You can ultimately fix your ship and get to the next phase of your space adventure, with Space Exploration and Recolonization, giving access to more mysteries in this new universe.

When a game ends, you get some special loot called “Legacy Rewards”.

Legacy Rewards are calculated from your starting deck, the duration of your game and what you accomplished in-game. Longer games give access to more loot, possibly adding permanent or even unique cards to collection.

See Gameplay: Colonization for more details about the Colonization scene.