I’ve never seen anything closer to “Escape Velocity the board game” than Xia: Legends of a Drift System and I very much doubt I ever will. In Xia there are so many paths to victory that at any given time it’s quite rare for any two players to be pursuing the same goal, which leads to some lovely emergent player interaction that’s hard to find elsewhere. You can do anything from bounty hunting to law enforcement to smuggling to mining to archaeology to commodity speculation and still come out ahead if you’re good enough at it because this game isn’t about being the best at anything specific – it’s about becoming famous.

The components of Xia are quite high-quality right out of the box, with thick cardboard and prepainted ships on sturdy flight stands. My customizations were honestly more formality than necessity on this particular game because there truly wasn’t that much to do – Far Off Games saw to that.

The only room I could find to improve the ships was to apply a light wash of diluted India ink, spray on some Dullcote, and add a touch of gloss to the cockpits (when visible) and engines to make them a bit shiny.

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The flight stands are intended to be fixed in place semi-permanently, but the friend that introduced me to this game preferred to keep the ships loose until a given one was needed by a player, and that approach made sense to me. So to improve on those I decided to add some color to the bases such that the bases specific to the players and NPC ships would be predefined instead of using interchangeable bases as normal. At the time all I had were craft paints and medium-large brushes, so it wasn’t a very precise job. Still, it improved the readability of the player colors and distinguished the NPCs from one another a bit better.

The last thing to do was black out or color the edges of the various cardboard chits. The map tiles and exploration tokens received full black, and all of the ship systems got their respective colors of Sharpie to help them stand out even in relatively-organized stacks. Xia is a game I’d like an insert for, such as the excellent one from Meeple Reality, but it is a credit to the good production design of Far Off Games that I don’t feel that I need one even with the large number of small and easily-mixed parts.

All in all, I don’t think my customizations to this particular game improved on the base terribly much by comparison to several others, but Xia actually manages not to need them to begin with.