Back at the base, Meld can be used to give your soldiers a number of permanent bonuses - once you research these upgrades and build the proper facility, of course - but doing so will put them out of commission for a handful of days. Typically, acquiring one of these canisters involves one of your invaluable soldiers going solo to reach its out-of-the-way location, so building up a healthy supply of Meld requires a certain degree of risk - or the mass reloading of saves. Each map now features two canisters of the mysterious substance known as 'Meld,' which self-destruct if left unopened after an indicated amount of turns. The biggest change for XCOM can be found in its new resource, slyly indicated by its title. So when Firaxis Games set out to expand upon Enemy Unknown, it only makes sense the team approached Enemy Within with a board game mentality similar to your Catans and Carcassonnes: present the same basic experience, but with some twists that bring a new layer of strategy for those tired of the vanilla version. When XCOM successfully rebooted last fall, Enemy Unknown struck me as the perfect board game to exist exclusively in the form of ones and zeroes.Īfter all, it offers everything you'd want from a boxed collection of tokens, figurines, maps, and cards: an easy-to-learn, hard-to-master ruleset, the thrill of going for broke on the back of a fickle dice roll, and the incentive to jump back in with a clean slate (and some much-needed hindsight) after one of many devastating losses.

Xcom enemy unknown vs enemy within