I ended up playing Markus last. He had Maquis, which was an interesting choice but as I mentioned, it was one of my higher choices (because it drafts well).

I went second, and this time I could do some skill dialing to set up my first mission attempt. I decided to pull out Nurse Chapel as she knows a thing or two about Alien Probes.

I opted to not start attempting until turn 3, which was still a couple turns before Markus did. But he had a doosey of a dilemma combo. The first was a choice Astro or Nav stop, which took out my only copy of both - on Sulu. And then he followed that with Caretaker's Wave. I seem to recall him holding me out here for at least two more attempts. The wave prevented me from restocking at home, as I had to use all my range just to fly to the mission. Luckily, this crew had the skills in spades, and nobody had died. So the 4th turn attempt was fine and succeeded in at least putting Ds under. On my turn 5, I drew and played a second ship, and that allowed me to fly the first home for repair and then attempt with the second. Markus killed my only copy of Evans in play on one of these later attempts, but a second Caretaker's Wave saw me come prepared and I solved.

I went to Historical Research second, as I had drawn into a ton of Anthro and Arch as well as my equipment granting Arch. I seem to recall busting it on the first go, as he had thrown a lot of choice stops but wasn't able to target either skill because I had at least 5 of each. This was on the 6th turn, by my count. I had flown both ships to the planet (one from space and one from home, and then after solving I flew one home and made sure that both were well staffed for heading to the second space for the double attempt on the 7th turn.

On Markus' first mission attempt, he opted for planet. I drew my Overwhelmed and that convinced him not to cheat the Ds, since hitting the skills would just stop a ton of people. So the first did a 1 man stop and then bounced and the second put one under but he had the skills so a ton of people were stopped. Still: 2 under seemed pretty good for the amount of damage I did. On his second attempt, I went ahead and put 3 under, just to be sure, and that meant he was pretty set to solve it on his 3rd attempt, when I drew 2 cost three duals.

Still, his deck suffered from poor range ships, so he was only able to fly to another mission after a solve if he had not returned home to restock/swap people. In this case, it meant that he was attempting space with rather poor options. I liked that I could kill someone decent and was a bit ahead on the solves, so I threw generously and gave him 3 under space to ensure a stop.

Markus ended up holding me in space for 4 attempts, but he unluckily drew the Timescape at the wrong times. So those 4 attempts happened on my 7th and 8th turns. The first attempt put 3 under (8 were attempting), so the second attempt had a shot at solving. Markus only drew two and couldn't play them, but I had miscounted in my Integrity, while I did have the people to solve with 5 in play, I had split them wrong and these 5 were on exactly 31 Integrity (instead of 32, as it was Amnesty Talks). This was due to using an Areel Shaw and a Sarek for the mission skills, when I could have used Sarek and George Stocker (and then had two copies of Areel in attempt one). On my 8th turn, I remedied this by making a 5 man crew with the right people and attempting with just 5, but this time Markus redrew and replayed the Caretaker's Wave. My super crew lacked the Engineer (or extra Nav). So I went with the big crew to make sure that Ds went under and set up for an autosolve on Turn 9. That was assuming that I could hold Markus out of his third mission for one more turn, but I didn't need to as Markus drew poorly on his 5 dilemmas and the crew was able to get enough through to solve.