Oh thank you for your kind words playfulpunk! You have made my day 🥰
Good questions! The idea is that each buddy collects their own bits and bobs, and you do too. That makes it feel like you’re all competing with each other for bragging rights about who had the best journey! 😎
If you want a more relaxed or simpler experience however, you could do similar to what you said: Move your buddies as normal (see below), but don’t worry about collecting any tokens for them at all. Just collect tokens for you when you arrive somewhere new. This will make each turn a bit simpler because you don’t need to count and track all of their tokens as well as yours, you’ll only have to track yours. It’ll also mean you’re not competing for bragging rights against each other’s journeys, and you’ll only have to score your own tokens.
In regards to movement and turn order, remember that after a player has moved their ship and received a benefit from that space, the slowest, or farthest-back ship is always the next ship to take a turn, no matter which player it belongs to. If that’s your ship, then great, move where you like! If it’s a buddy’s turn to move, then who decides where to move it? One of the human players of course! (This isn’t a digital game yet 😅)
- If you’re playing with another human player, then whomever owns the ship that is farthest ahead gets to move the buddy.
- If you’re the only human player, then you pick where they move! Just like the choice above in a two-human game, you could move the buddy to be mean and block a space you were hoping to visit. Or, you could be a little kinder and move them somewhere else. To take your decision out entirely and prevent having to compete against yourself, use a randomiser like rolling a six-sided die or flipping a coin! For example: If you roll 1-3 (or land heads), move the buddy ship to the next free space in front of your ship. If you roll a 4-6 (or land tails), move it to the next one after that.
I hope that helps knock down any barriers to you being able to play Star Scouts! 😊