Lone Shark Games is bringing to board-gamers a vision of the world a billion years into the future. In The Ninth World: A Skillbuilding Game for Numenera, clever Jacks, smart Nanos, and powerful Glaives vie to prove who’s the most valorous hero, or they can combine forces to save the land from rampaging monsters and villainous forces. Along the way, your heroes will collect the artifacts of long-dead civilizations, and these cyphers will lead you to greater glory.

Designed by Paul Peterson, Boyan Radakovich, and Mike Selinker based on a universe created by Monte Cook Games, The Ninth World: A Skillbuilding Game for Numenera boasts a revolutionary gameplay mechanic. It’s a ‘skillbuilding’ game, meaning you get five cards — and only ever five cards — that you advance over the course of time in five play styles. But putting too much effort into skillbuilding means you don’t do enough to claim cards and gain points. Based on these skills, the bidding order will change every phase, and precious resources may slip from your grasp if you’re not clever enough.

For those not familiar with Numenera, this is a great introduction to the world. Board gamers can focus solely on maximizing the mechanics, or take a deep dive into the setting. The game plays for 1-5 players as a solo, cooperative, or competitive game. There are 12 character tableaus in the base set, along with the nine five-card regions of the Steadfast that each provide a very different style of adventure. A scoring board folds out from the box with a gameplay map of the Steadfast on the other side. The artwork is lush and evocative of this fascinating world abundant with adventures, treasures, and, of course, onerous beasts.

“This is a world we’ve wanted to play in for a very long time,” Selinker says. “Monte and friends made a bright shining future with everything you’d expect and much more that you wouldn’t expect. It was a board game waiting to happen.”

Here’s how the game works:

The players choose a region in which to adventure. They decide whether they’ll be playing a quick game (five rounds) or a full game (nine rounds), and whether they’re playing cooperatively or competitively.

Each player takes a hero and that hero’s tokens and bid shield. Each hero has an adjective power which defines one of their skills, a noun power which defines another, and a verb power which gives them something special to do. Players may customize their heroes with a deck of power cards as desired.

“I love how we captured the core three-part concept of characters in Numenera,” says Peterson. “I’m not just a hero, I’m ‘a Learned Nano who Rides the Lightning.’ We translated it into mechanics that work in this card game but still make the characters feel unique.”

The hero will start with two skill cards (say, Combat 1 and Focus 1) and three Effort cards. Using these cards, the player will bid during each of five phases: Scout, Tinker, Charm, Combat, and Focus. During each phase, the heroes will find and claim new cards from the town and wilderness, gain Valor, and perhaps advance a skill at the end. Then they’ll move on to a new region and adventure even further. In competitive mode, whoever has the most Valor at the end wins.

“The addition of having the players progress through one of the regions of the world of Numenera as they play really helped to bring home the story of what the players are doing in the game,” Peterson explains.

In co-op mode, the heroes are a team, and adversaries of the wild are trying to destroy their communities. A town is in trouble, and strange creatures will wipe it out if the heroes don’t control the population. Meanwhile, people in the world are calling for new quests, and rampant cyphers are making it harder to win. If any hero doesn’t have enough Valor when the threshold is called, you all lose. But if you save the town with enough Valor, you win!  

“Working with Bo and Mike on this game has been a fantastic journey,” Peterson says. “I've loved watching the game evolve from a simple proto-mechanic about bidding with a fixed hand of cards to the intricate and elegant ‘hand-building’ game we have today. I remember very fondly the three of us sitting down in a Mexican restaurant and banging out a surprisingly final set of rules for cooperative play in an evening.”

Future expansions will focus on other areas of the Ninth World: the Beyond, the Great Reach, the Deep, and so on. As the world continues to develop, board-gamers will see strange new lands in Monte Cook Games’ epic future world.

“I'm very proud of the game design for The Ninth World,” says Radakovich. “Paul and I must've been in a telepathic link the whole time, because the game progressed as we both intended very rapidly. Everyone loved the game, but then sempai Selinker took it to a whole new level beyond. The Ninth World is a deep and beautiful game.”

The Ninth World: A Skillbuilding Game for Numenera will be available from Lone Shark Games in the next few months. Get ready for the adventure of a billion lifetimes.

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Sharky McSharkerson is the customer service representative at Lone Shark Games. His job is to answer all customer emails, but cut him some slack… he doesn’t have any thumbs!