Daniel (@dungeondive) closes out the Raid on Enjo mission and walks through Aftermath’s colony phase — the half of the game that runs between missions and that no other Plaid Hat game has had quite this shape before.
Success entry 98.1 awards +5 food and +1 morale; entry 98.3 pivots the campaign — the colony’s actual providers are missing, presumed dead, and Grumpel and Mesaiya are now the closest thing the colony has to professionals. Then the colony phase proper. The mission overran its 5-turn time allowance by 2, so two colony events trigger from the encounter deck: Raiders snuck in (population -1, scrap -1, food -2), then Smokey the cat ambushed someone (population -2 — preventable with a Watchtower or Lookout Post the colony does not yet own). Population is now 5. Then the Eat step: -1 food per population.
Daniel walks the Build menu — Public Council, Mender’s Hut, Workshop (unlocks the Blade Bikes vehicle), Expanded Nest, Water Pump, Garden (Grumpel’s win condition — requires mission card 10 and the pump), Lookout Post, Training Grounds, Market. He saves the campaign back into the character tuck-boxes. He admits he hasn’t used his character abilities once across the run and suspects the better ones unlock with build-step rewards.
Aftermath’s colony phase punishes you for taking too long on missions via random encounter draws against the home base. Does that create real tension on the mission side, or does it just feel like a separate punishment layer?