You can’t go there Levi.
You are not authorized Levi.
You don’t have a command token Levi.
On the third day, Levi finally asked:
Yes … But, what’s a ship chaplain supposed to do when he can’t visit and chat with everyone on the ship?
You just need a command token, Levi. We aren’t being mean… we just need a command token before you can enter!
And Levi had a new mission! One by one, he’d get to the crew in those five off limit areas!
But first, he had scheduled a get together with Recon. First things first he thought as he walked over to the Recon Section where he blessed them all as promised:
May God make all grace overflow to you so that you will have enough of everything in every way.
=> Blessing 17 (Recon) (full blessing – printable PDF with clickable links)
Wait a minute! (Levi was thinking … and that can be dangerous)
What was it they said that I didn’t have? A command token? What’s a “command token”?
Ah ha! I need inside intelligence for this… someone who is an officially appointed leader! Someone who’d know this “command” stuff!
And Levi was off to chat with Ilse!
And, of course, Levi was right. After all, he’d seen Ilse’s Personnel File :)
Said to be a former intelligence operative, Ilse leverages her logistical skills now aboard Vanguard, overseeing dozens of lander missions. As a leader, she expects a lot of her team, but gives back tenfold to those who meet her halfway.
And Ilse had a long chat with Levi.. about the Barracks, about the Situation Room, about the Research Laboratory, about the Production Complex and about the Add-On Facility. And finally … about those “Command Tokens” (and she had a few in her pocket)
Notice that Awaken Realms includes SIX of them. Only SIX (so you can never have more than 6)! Plus, you cannot save them up from one Ship Phase to the next. When you are finished visiting the Facilities in one Ship Phase, all command tokens (and energy tokens) are discarded and you are back to zero of each. So… since you can’t save them, use them … but we will need to use them WISELY!
Since I don’t have the final game, I am not sure about these, but here’s what I think they actually are:
Headache tokens!
(my new name for them)
There are FIVE FACILITIES on ISS Vanguard that are extremely important, and you can’t enter any of them without a command token.
And (unlike Ilse) we don’t have a pocketful of them! I don’t have the final game, but from what I can see, we may start the campaign with just TWO Command Tokens! In Prototype 2, during Ship Phase we could visit EVERY facility (actually, we HAD to visit them all as we paged through the Ship Book). It seems Awaken Realms has tweaked the game to limit this significantly. I may not be able to build up my crew (via the Barracks) as quickly as before. Not if I also want to do research and production (not to mention handle all the situations that pop up during EVERY Ship Phase). Here are the Five Facilities (from the Final Ship Book) that are off limits without a Command Token (note that we won’t be using the Add-On facility until later in the campaign):
The amount of Command Tokens you start each Ship Phase with will vary based on the current Objective and Morale! Both of these change as the campaign progresses and are kept in the top row of cards just after the Bridge:
We will have to wait till someone with the final game can let us know how many Command Tokens the first couple Objectives provide us … but we **DO** know that if we keep MORALE HIGH we get one extra Command Token at the start of the Facilities portion of Ship Phase. Morale has four levels … we start at “Medium” as per page 7 of the rulebook:
And the Glossary on page 44 has this definition:
So far not all that helpful. Next we pull out our Ship Book and look at page 2:
From this it appears that the Morale levels are:
- Very Low
- Low
- Medium
- High
To get more Command Tokens we need to raise it to the highest level (level 4). At the same time we need to avoid having it fall to low where we get LESS Command Tokens! Paging through the Rulebook and Ship Book I saw a few ways that the Morale setting can get lowered! But only one way to raise it … when crewmembers die! Look at two of the crew card slots for fallen crewmembers:
You don’t get this benefit until the THIRD Security Section crewmember dies. Then after even more crew die there is one more:
Neither of the books tell you just HOW to boost your morale, but it seems like it will happen during your planetary exploration missions. Or maybe via resolving “situations”? Who knows? (and you say, “The shadow knows” and I reply “Lindsey Stirling”) Once someone gets their game please let me know how we can boost our morale (just send me a note via the CONTACT ME page)
Without the final game, it is hard for me to write about what happens in each of the five facilities. Perhaps I will use the preliminary Ship Book pages as a guide as long as everyone realizes that it might be different in the real game!
At this point Levi was thinking that visiting all the facilities during the same Ship Phase was almost like beating a dead horse … but then he remembered Maeda talking about beating something else … DRUMS! Maybe watching the video of her daughter performing during that public festival would help his headache (or make it worse?) But he had no Command Tokens yet, so off he went to scout out Maeda:
Hiya Mae! Can we watch one of your videos of your daughter in that drum concert again? I need a little distraction from a dilemma that I am in :)
Oh, Levi … I’m so sorry to hear that you have a dilemma. But, sure, I welcome the excuse to watch my daughter again … I miss her so very much. Family is so important in Japan you know.
And a minute later they were watching this energetic taiko drum performance:
Maeda was smiling … REALLY smiling at the end of that video.
That’s my girl in the middle. Levi, we need to get some of her energy into our life here on this starship.
Yes, Mae, we do. We really do. We can combine that energy with the energy that fills the Mess Hall during our Piano Jam Sessions! We need Drum Jam Sessions too!
Maeda was so happy …
Levi … one more video please. I can’t watch it all alone.
Levi just laid back against the wall (they were sitting on the floor).
Yes, Mae. One more Mae. One more!
After that … Mae went out walking the halls with Levi. Family was important. Levi was like family here on the starship. Just like family (as she wiped away the tears from her eyes).
My ISS Vanguard 
I had some major concerns when I heard about the change to command tokens.
How would we manage to get things done to keep up with the previous version?
I believe the answer is that the production and research have changed from 3 turns per item to just one. So we no longer have to research every turn for 3 turns to invent something, just once, and can spend 2 turns doing other things.
Hopefully, it will work out about the same.
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