Once players are comfortable with the core rules of the game, they should add flare cards to their future games.

Flare Cards

Flare cards provide players with powerful abilities that can be used repeatedly. Each flare has a blue bar indicating the prerequisities for it to be played. When a player plays a flare card, they use its wild ability.

However, if that player has the matching alien sheet, they must use the super ability instead.

Only the player who has the Kamikaze alien sheet can use this card's super ability.

After a player plays a flare card, they return it to their hand. A player cannot play more than one flare card during an encounter, and the same flare card cannot be played more than once during an encounter, even by a different player.

If a player's alien sheet is facedown (due to losing their alien power), they cannot use the super ability on the matching flare card, but they can use the wild ability instead.

Advanced Setup

To play the advanced game, players replace steps 4 and 5 of setup as follows:

4. Choose Aliens: Shuffle the flare cards and deal two facedown to each player. Each player takes the two alien sheets matching their flare cards, chooses one sheet to keep, and returns the other to the game box. Then, all players reveal their chosen sheet simultaneously.

5. Prepare Cosmic Deck: Collect the flare cards that were dealt to each player; if playing with fewer than five players, add additional flares randomly to bring the total to 10. Then, shuffle those 10 flares with the encounter, reinforcement, and artifact cards to create the cosmic deck.

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