Space invader

The first thing to understand is that Civolution is a sandbox game. A big, heavy sandbox. It’s a cliché in heavy Euro games to say there are a lot of paths to victory, but in the case of Civolution it’s warranted. The first time you sit down to play the game the thing that hits you first is just how big the player boards are. The ”consoles’ as the game calls them are huge. My first thought was one of “Uh-oh, Stefan’s gone for a gimmick here to make the game stand out”, but that fear was pretty quickly allayed. The left side of the board is mostly used to house resources, while the right is your menu of actions.

At this point you might think it would be better to have a shared action board in the same way A Feast For Odin does it, but there are some pretty good reasons why that would never work. You see, in Civolution you all start with the same actions available to you, but as the game goes on you can upgrade the actions by flipping or removing the action tiles from their sockets, meaning that my Migrate action, for example, might be more powerful than yours. Strategy in the game is so woven into the combinations of actions and resources that having your actions right there in front of you, so personal, makes playing and understanding the game easier.

The resource side of the console you could argue could be done smaller, but I’m glad they didn’t. Unusually for a modern Euro, there aren’t a heap of different wooden or cardboard resources. In fact there are none! Each player has a pile of octagonal wooden pieces which have a variety of different uses. The different resource types each have a space on your console, and you use your wooden markers to show what you have. For example, if you collect two wood, you put two markers in the ‘wood’ space on the board. It’s so easy, and important (for me at least) is how quick it makes setup and teardown. The resource spaces are in rows and columns too, which denote which type of region they come from, and how much they’re worth if you trade them.

On top of all of this, figuratively as well as literally, is the big, empty, unusual space above the board. This space is where you slot in cards you’ve been able to play, giving you yet more decisions to make, and a chance to build a powerful engine to drive your civilisation forward. Cards get slotted into rows and columns. The higher the row, the more points it’s worth at the end of the game, but the more expensive it is to place it. Placement is a trickier decision than you might think, because once you play a card of a certain colour into a slot, all subsequent cards of the same colour have to go in that same column. So despite the player boards being so large, they serve a genuine purpose.

In addition to the consoles you need to find space for two more boards and a jigsaw-style map, but with them being modular you can make it work with whatever table space you might have available.

Dicing with destiny

I used a lot of words to try and convey how big and imposing Civolution is, but I did it for a good reason. This game looks daunting and confusing, and that in itself is enough to put people off. Maybe not people like you and I, people who love a heavy game, but those who you’d like to welcome to the dark side who are heavy-curious. Once you get past that initial ‘Woah’ factor, playing the game is really not that bad. I mentioned Castles of Burgundy at the top of this review, and you can see some of its DNA in Civolution. Actions are driven by your personal stash of dice. If you don’t like the values on your dice you can use ‘ideas’ in the same way you could ‘workers’ in Castles to change the value one step. You place dice on spots matching their values, take the action, then remove them. Sound familiar? Each action requires two dice of different values, so while it’s true that someone could just roll lucky each round, the reality is that you need to allow for a bit of mitigation in your plans.

There’s a central pool of extra dice you can take from by using a certain action, and extra dice are a good thing, because it means you can take more actions before you’re forced to take a reset turn. Reset turns are what drive each round towards completion and although a necessity, often feel like a wasted turn. Everyone else is doing something, and you’re stuck rolling your dice instead. Even in this though, this simple cycle of dice rolling and using, there’s strategy. If someone grabs a load of dice early in the game you might think it gives them an insurmountable advantage long-term, but taking a minute to extrapolate what’s going on makes you realise it’s not necessarily the case. They took turns to claim those dice for a start, and while they might have lots of dice to spend, if the rest of the players are driving the round towards its end with frequent resets, they might not get the chance to use them all.

That’s just one small example of the layers upon layers of strategy bubbling under the surface of Civolution. All of these words so far and I’ve not even touched on the map in the middle of the table, which is what the whole game is built around. You send your tribes out in the world to collect resources and build farms and settlements. As they move from region to region they discover new resources and uncover new landmarks. So far, so 4X, but it introduces a really interesting layer of economics into the game which I think is under-appreciated.

You can only gather resources once they’ve been discovered by migrating tribes into new regions. This lets people Produce resources in them, then later Transport (two of the game’s actions) to move them to their boards to use. However, you can also use the Trade action to gain resources. If they’ve been discovered on the map those resources cost two Gold each. If they haven’t, you can still buy them, but they cost four gold, and gold is hard to come by. If nobody decides to explore the continent – which is a perfectly valid strategy – you need to make sure you’ve got a good economy, or you’re going to struggle to build and pay for cards later in the game.

It’s such a unique direction for a modern Euro to take. To have a game which can be so different every time you play it, and to have so much of the game’s meandering path from start to end dictated by the players’ actions.

Making tracks

Euro fans rejoice – Civolution has tracks. Six of them! Well, five with an extra, little track on another board, but hey, a track’s a track. The tracks grant you rewards and end-of-game points, but some are randomly chosen during the game setup to give some big points at the end of each of the four eras. You climb the tracks by playing cards that come with a cost, and then form a part of your own engine. It’s all very by-the-books from that point of view, and that’s good, because we like those things in a game. But for a game to stand out, it needs something different. Something interesting. A hook.

Civolution’s hook is the dice. The white dice are used to conduct actions – two dice per action, and the dice used have to match those on the action. As mentioned earlier, there are ways to mitigate for unlucky rolls, and in order to do well you need to allow yourself to take the occasional turn to bolster those mitigation options. Then you have the pink dice which are used for hunting and passing tests in the game, and those tests are usually ways to boost the effectiveness of upgraded actions. At first, you have one pink die and only pass if you roll a one, but as the game goes on you get the chance to get more dice, and by moving up the sixth (Agera) track, the number range you need to roll gets bigger. Hitting 1-3 on three dice is much more likely than a 1 on one die.

The dice form the bulk of the game’s player interaction too. There are only a few extra pink and white dice to claim (player count + 1), so what happens when they all get claimed? The action to take a die still exists on all players’ boards, so when you perform it when all the dice are claimed, you take a die from the player with the most of the colour you chose. Aside from dice thievery, the other direct interaction comes when you move tribes around the map. You can kick someone out of their spot and into ‘the wilderness’, at the expense of weakening your own tribe. It’s nice, there’s just enough bite there to keep things interesting without the game devolving into a game of spite and take-that!

Final thoughts

Trying to keep this review around 1500 words has proved really difficult, which is why it now tops 2000. I just want to talk and ramble about it so much. It rode a huge wave of hype after Essen, and I like to make a point of waiting for that initial hype to die down before I play and review a game, because it’s easy to get swept along, even subconsciously. Civolution was worth the wait. It sounds ridiculous to say, so I’m hesitant to even give life to the words, but this might just be Stefan’s magnum opus ahead of Castles of Burgundy as far as I’m concerned. And that’s coming from someone who’s bought three different versions of CoB over the years and has over 50 games logged on BGA on top of real-life plays.

The way that every game feels and unfolds differently is great. Yes, the actions on offer are the same each time, and the map is only randomised to a certain extent, but the way things play out differs every time. The example I gave above about nobody exploring is just one example. In a recent 4-player game we stuck to a third of the map and things were tight. I discovered stone – a resource that you need for quite a lot of early game things – in the fourth and final era, which brought a collective “Oh my god! Finally!” from the table. In another game one player found himself alone in a corner of the world with three tribes and no competition and ended up racking up a load of points by moving around the regions in a circle (one space in each region gives VPs for occupying it).

I want to make a special mention of the production in Civolution. The player boards are huge, but premium, and I love the way that it just uses the same octagonal pieces for everything in the game. It makes setup and teardown so easy, so quick and means that I don’t have to factor that time into the ‘have we got time to play this?’ decision at game night, and to me that’s a blessing. The huge raft of actions available will undoubtedly put some people off, and if you don’t already like heavy games, I don’t think this is the one that’ll change your mind, but the rest of you will love it. A glorious sandbox which feels like all the best bits of Stefan Feld’s designs rolled up into one beautiful game. A must-have in my opinion.

Civolution (2024)

Design: Stefan Feld
Publisher: Deep Print Games
Art: Dennis Lohausen
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 120-240 mins

The post Civolution Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Star wars

The overall premise of Eclipse is pretty simple. Explore the space around you, adding more tiles as you go, building the shared galaxy. If the new system has resources you can gather them as ongoing income. If it has aliens in it, you can fight them for glory and riches. If two players come into conflict, they can fight one another by rolling dice. Pretty much exactly what you might expect. How it does it all is really clever, really engaging, and a lot of fun for the most part.

You can take as many turns as you like in each round by moving a disc from your Influence Track to your action track. Why wouldn’t you take ten actions instead of three? Each action you take increases the amount you need to pay at the end of the round as upkeep, so you need to be careful you don’t go beyond your means. It’s a clever system that introduces a nice level of balance. Sure, you can go out to produce as much money as possible to take loads of actions, but without materials or science (the other two of the game’s three currencies), all of those actions might be worthless.

It’s a simple balance which is made lop-sided by the variety of different alien races available and leaning into their unique, asymmetric abilities and differences. The Planta for instance are interesting to play as their strategy relies on exploring more than the other races, controlling lots of systems, so you might well find the Planta’s player exploring backwards, away from the conflict.

One of my favourite things about the game is the fact that although each player has the same class of ships available to build. the components and technology are completely customisable. You want a finely balanced ship with computers, shields, guns, and engines? Great, go for it. You want to create a glass cannon ship which is essentially a load of cannons duct-taped together with an engine stapled to it? Fill your boots. It’s a cool system which makes the game more engaging, as you need to know what you’re getting yourself into when it comes to PvP combat.

You’re actively encouraged to spread your wings and explore, because exploring means more resources, and often grabbing an exploration tile at the same time. The tiles give you a minimum of 2VPs, but often have some great bonuses such as free ships for your fleet, or unique, powerful techs to employ. The spreading tendrils of your empires eventually intertwine, and that’s where the interaction begins. The interaction is what drives Eclipse and makes it as much fun as it is.

In space, everyone can hear you scream. And cheer. And groan.

It should go without saying that Eclipse is a very interactive game. Player interaction is baked into its very core. It’s not a case of if players are going to fight one another, it’s a case of when, and who will fight. There’s a potentially overlooked piece of the game’s production that reinforces the interaction, and that’s the tech tray. Each round a new batch of the universe’s hottest new tech becomes available and gets added to the tray, and the first turns of each round often turn into a bun-fight for who manages to get their sticky mitts on which new tech first. In practical terms, the tray gets handed around the table like a box of chocolates, and in two of the different groups I’ve played Eclipse with it’s been referred to as the chocolate box. It’s a communal activity that gets eyes up from the player boards and boring holes into the souls of the other players, using every ounce of psychic energy to defy them from choosing the tile you wa… oh, you bastard, you took the one I wanted.

Get used to that.

The techs that become available are drawn from a bag each round, which means sometimes you’ll not see new weapons appear for the first half of the game, for instance. Once they do, the competition for them is fierce, and the lucky person who gets their hand on a powerful new tech quickly becomes a force to be reckoned with. It’s a decent way for the game to evolve, but it can be almost painful to be the last person to pick once all the good stuff has gone. If you plan your game around destroying anything stupid enough to wander into your crosshairs and you’re left with the puny “does one damage on a 6 rolled on a D6” guns, it sucks. Plain and simple. Especially if you’re the player to the right of the first player in a 6-player game, as five players get to pick before you. This is fixed with a turn order variant which I would recommend always playing with, but the out-of-the-box experience is a pain in the backside.

One of the thickest, twangiest strings to the Eclipse bow is how different every game is. The techs come out in different order, the space tiles are always somewhere different than the last time you played, and the races around the table start out in different proximity to one another. You can try to play the same way again and again, but fate (and the tech tile bag) will simply kick you in the balls and laugh at you, delivering upgraded drives instead of the plasma cannons you had on your Christmas list.

It’s clear that a ton of development has gone into Eclipse. The interlocking systems are so finely tuned that it feels like a polished Euro game. I love a Euro with complex, interlocking systems. The biggest difference between Eclipse and a Euro though, is the sandpit nature of the game. It ought to be its biggest strength, but as often as not, it’s its biggest problem. With the loose reins that the players are on when running headlong into this sandpit, it’s easy to trip and find yourself trying to stand back up for the rest of the game.

We will rebuild! Or at least, we’ll try to.

If you’re doing well in Eclipse you feel powerful. It’s a really fun experience to just keep adding more and more guns to your unstoppable war machine and clash head-on with someone else doing the same thing. If, however, you stumble early, it can be a lonely, demoralising experience. My most recent experience (and the trigger for me writing this review) saw me fall victim to the dice. Not once. Not even twice. Three times in a row. Combat in Eclipse isn’t deterministic as it is in Voidfall. All you can do is give yourself the best chance you can when it comes to combat. Add more guns to your ships, giving you more dice to roll per ship, then send a bunch into combat. From there you hope the law of averages works out. Lady luck is fickle though, and when you lose fights you should have won on average, it’s so painful. Going in with 60/40 odds in your favour won’t cut it. You want to be going in with at least 85% likelihood of winning to be sure.

When your ships are destroyed, all you can do is rebuild. Rebuilding takes resources, and more often than not you need to wait until the next income turn to get the resources you need, not to mention the actions, which as we learned before, cost money. The money you get from income rounds. Every round you spend rebuilding is another round your rivals are making their armada bigger and stronger, and experienced players can start snowballing in power. I realise I probably sound like I’m moaning about nothing here. It’s a 4X game, right? You take a gamble, it might not pay off. You take your licks and start again. In other games, it doesn’t feel as downright punishing. There’s a sweetener in that you get to take something out of the VP tile bag just for taking part in a battle, which is a genuinely great thing when war is foisted upon you by another player, but it’s no real compensation for losing everything you had in one fell swoop.

To make it clear, we’re talking about finding yourself potentially two rounds wasted (of eight in total) just because the dice you thought you’d swung in your favour didn’t work out. Honestly, I’m not sure what could be done to change it – the dice, combat system, and tech upgrades are so integral to the system now.

The same is true of getting cornered, which sounds like a ridiculous thing to say in a game about exploring space. if your neighbours align their explored tiles in such a way that you can’t join yours to them, sometimes your only choice is to explore away from the middle, taking the lower-value zone 3 tiles, or to push towards the middle of the board, into a skirmish you know you can’t win. Woe betide you if someone notices your bottleneck and forces their way down it.

Regardless, for all my moaning, people like Eclipse. Correction – people LOVE Eclipse, and why shouldn’t they? It does everything it sets out to and more. Overall it’s a very, very good game. My problem is with the sharp edges left in the cosmic sandbox.

Final thoughts

This is an odd review for me to write. I think Eclipse: Second Dawn for the Galaxy is a fantastic game that scales well from all counts from two to six. It sets out to do something specific and it does it. So why, at the top of the review did I say I’m not sure I ever want to play it again? Unless you’re very good at the game (and I am not), realising you don’t have a hope of winning with two more hours to play can feel soul-destroying. Eclipse needs a specific group to get the most from it. Friends who want to get together and enjoy an evening of games, snacks, drinks, and banter. You can end up in situations where one or more players are basically out of the game, or playing as a race which doesn’t quite work. If someone doesn’t know how to really lean on their race’s abilities, they’re screwed. make sure you do some hand-holding once you start playing with non-Terran races.

In the game I referenced above I had to rebuild my ships three separate times, and each time I did it I wasn’t advancing. I wasn’t challenging the other players. I was stuck in a narrow band of space I had no sideways escape from, my only option was to head to the middle of the map, straight into the arms of a waiting war machine. I enjoyed the evening, and I had fun with my friends, but two-and-a-half hours of not being able to compete or interact with anyone else isn’t much of a gaming experience for anyone. Honestly I suspect that some, if not most of that was down to the way I played. Choices I made, mistakes I made, but that’s my point. When you’re learning the game your bike can be very wobbly, while other players are off doing somersaults over ramps. Stabilisers are the way to go. What makes Eclipse sing is the group you play with. Ease them into their first few games, and you’ll have more players who love the experience. Steamroll them and I wouldn’t expect to see them at the next game.

Take it as a warning more than anything else. You’ll have amazing battles, you’ll be telling the stories of “Remember that game when all that stuff happened” for ages and be making great memories, but some people may have a thoroughly demoralising time. It may mean that more experienced players have to make sub-optimal plays just to keep the game flowing and keep everyone involved, or at least help them make good choices. Or not. Maybe you love a game where you get to trip someone over and then steal their lunch money. If you do, Eclipse is perfect.

Eclipse is an experience in a box. If you enjoy it, you’ll play it 20, 40, a hundred times and still love every minute, and it’ll be more than worth its £120+ price point. Just make sure it’s right for you and yours before you spend. If you want to get an idea of what it’s like before you spend, check out the excellent TTS scripted mod. It’s quick and easy to use, and I managed to get three online games played in addition to the two real-life plays. I still prefer Voidfall, but there’s no denying that Eclipse: Second Dawn for thee Galaxy is a fantastic game.

Eclipse: Second Dawn For The Galaxy (2020)

Design: Touko Tahkokallio
Publisher: Lautapelit.fi
Art: Noah Adelman, Jere Kasanen, Jukka Rajaniemi, Sampo Sikiö
Players: 2-6
Playing time: 60-200 mins

The post Eclipse: Second Dawn for the Galaxy Review appeared first on Punchboard.

At first glance you’d be forgiven for thinking that Cartolan – Trade Winds is another tile-laying game, aping others like Isle of Skye or the granddaddy, Carcassonne. While it’s true that you draw tiles and place them, matching edges, it’s there that the similarities end. Cartolan has ideas of its own, and if this preview copy is anything to go by, fans of tile games have something new to tempt them.

Throw caution to the wind

Cartolan puts you in the roles of adventurers, seeking to explore the unknown world and open lucrative trade routes with the various ports and cities obscured by the fog of ignorance. Much of this world is water, naked to the wind, and these trade winds play an important part in the game. As you turn over tiles and expand the map, you’ll notice that each of the tiles has an arrow in the corner, showing which way the wind blows.

The wind is employed as a unique mechanism. After your standard turn of moving one of your adventurers twice, you can hop into your hypothetical boat and drift with the wind for another two tiles, as long as it’s over the watery edges of the tiles. Another mechanism lets you add an inn to a tile for a paltry single piece of treasure. When you visit an inn for the first time on your turn it lets you rest and take a full turn of movement again.

I try not to delve into the inner workings of a game, but in Cartolan’s case I wanted to point out this exploration, because it really sets it apart from other tile-layers, like the ones I mentioned above. The world doesn’t get revealed one tile at a time. In a four-player game of Cartolan you can easily expand the initial map of five tiles to more than 20 after just one turn each. You also start to notice that due to the rules about the direction of the wind on newly-added tiles, trade winds start to create large clockwise or anti-clockwise loops, which is nicely thematic.

Fill the coffers

Winning a game of Cartolan means collecting lots and lots of silk – the game’s currency – and there’s loads of it thrown at you. Exploring the world and filling-in gaps is encouraged, because any time a tile gets added, you pocket three silk for each existing edge you touch with it. Bam, that’s nine silk right there. You get more for discovering ports, piracy (see below), and finding the mythical city that’s rumoured* to be in the stacks of tiles.

(*spoiler alert: it’s definitely in there, I’ve seen it).

Cartolan is a very competitive game, and while it doesn’t outright demand that you resort to piracy, it’s definitely encouraged. Landing in the same space as another adventurer lets you turn the way of the Jolly Roger and attack them, potentially stealing all the silk they were carrying. I say potentially because success is based on a game of rock-paper-scissors between the attacker and defender. I really like that the competition is based above the table, but personally, I prefer a decider that can’t be tied. We found it slightly more thematic to get the defender to put a silk token in one hand and see if the attacker can guess which. Winner gets the reward. This is still a preview though, so take that with a pinch of salt.

Piracy is a double-edged cutlass. Pirates cannot place inns or trade, so they need to get back to a city and bank their ill-gotten gains before someone else lands on the same tile as them, and claims a silken reward for arresting them. It’s a refreshing change to see a game in this style have this much interaction. You’re not forced to attack one another if it’s not your bag, but personally, I really enjoy balancing the risk and reward of exploration and getting back to the bank.

Not all plain sailing

Despite wearing the silken finery of a simple tile game, Cartolan as it stands is quite fussy. You’ll find yourself constantly taking and making change with the silk tokens. It’s entirely possible to place four tiles on a turn, and when you consider that you can be claiming silk every time you place a tile, there’s a lot of picking up tokens. The tokens go on your character card before they’re banked, which is the same place as your carried tiles go (you can carry and place some, as well as drawing blind from the stacks), and the text which explains each character’s bonus abilities. The tokens start to fill the cards quickly, and you can’t let it spill over, as each character’s haul is its own. Later in the game you can have up to four adventurers on the go, each with their own tiles, character card, and silk piles, and it can get messy and chaotic.

I hope it doesn’t cause offence for me to guess that the designer, Tom, is a bit of a nerd, like me. Maybe? This is the first preview I’ve been given which comes with a custom online implementation, and a github repo full of the source code (in Python, yummy) for simulating the game. I applaud this approach because it’s clearly been used to balance the game, and it’s a step that’s not usually done to this level by many new designers. My hope is that the same level of care and introspection will get applied to the physical game and the rulebook, both of which could do with some improvement.

Again, take this whole section with the caveat that I’m playing a prototype copy. A very nicely made prototype, but a prototype all the same.

Final thoughts

Cartolan – Trade Winds caught me by surprise. I was expecting another tile-laying game in the same mould as those that came before it, but it’s a fresh, interesting game. It actually plays like a race. The score track is in rows of 15, and if one player manages to get a full row ahead at the front of the pack, they win. You can win by getting to 100 first, or having the most when the tiles run out, but the threat of someone running away and winning early keeps everyone focused on the game state, and you can end up with some unspoken ‘kill the king’ agreements.

There’s a funny kind of duality at the core of Cartolan which I enjoy. The frenetic racing to explore the world and earn the big bucks is in stark contrast to the chill aesthetic and the notion of letting the breeze carry your sailboat over the horizon. There’s a feeling of trying to go about your own business, all the while with one eye on the person ahead of you, their chest laden with goodies, and the other eye on the person behind you with a dagger between their teeth.

It’s a natural next game for those of you who enjoy Carcassonne and Isle of Skye. I’m not saying there’s a direct connection to the way they play, but their exploration and expansion of the tile map are certainly reminiscent of them. I know Tom is actively taking on board the feedback he’s getting from the community at the moment. Between this and the rigorous playtesting and attention to detail, if they get the price point right, I think Cartolan – Trade Winds can, and should do really well.

Preview copy provided by the publisher. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

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The post Cartolan – Trade Winds Preview appeared first on Punchboard.

If you saw the words ‘GMT Games’ in the previous paragraph, and you’re expecting to read a review of a war game, think again. SpaceCorp is a game of exploration, expansion, and exploiting the precious resources found on other planets and asteroids. In fact, I guess you could call it a 3X game, instead of a 4X, as there’s not much in the way of extermination going on. You don’t need me to tell you that 4X has been done to death, but what I can tell you is that SpaceCorp does things differently to the vast majority of exploration games out there.

Economies of scale

Or more accurately, economies and scale. SpaceCorp has both in abundance. As you might have gathered from the game’s name, you’re running corporations, and in the not-too-distant future there’s big bucks to be made in space. Throughout the game you’ll be trying to turn a profit, mainly by running production on your various outposts and buildings as they’re built, but also by beating others to some shared objectives.

Currency is just currency at the end of the day though. What makes SpaceCorp so exciting is the sheer scale of the game as it progresses. The full game is split into three eras, each with its own board, with each successive era introducing new rules and variances into the game. It’s a bit like a game coming with modular expansions, that are gradually added in.

The first era sees your fledgling corporation building its foundations in the relative safety of this side of the asteroid belt. From there, your small steps turn into giant leaps, as you broaden your horizons toward the outer solar system, and the vast distances and radiation dangers that come along with it. The third, and final, era takes you interstellar, heading to nearby star systems to continue your expansion. The exponential layers of distance and scale each era introduces, make it feel like a truly epic undertaking.

It’s not rocket science

The biggest surprise when it comes to playing SpaceCorp 2025-2300AD is how easy it is to play. If your preconception of a GMT game is something akin to a physical spreadsheet on the table, you’ll be surprised with how simple, and refined, things are in space. Movement, exploration, building, and research are all driven by cards. Instead of cards filled with detailed artwork and fluff text, there are huge, colour-coded boxes, with bold text explaining the value of each. It’s a brilliant design choice, as it removes a layer of comprehension, leaving you free to concentrate on what you want to do, instead of trying to understand if you can do it. I wish more games did it this way.

The basic gameplay loop is very quick and easy. Choose an action, see if anything else gets triggered by your action, discard any played cards and refresh your hand and the display. Despite turns ticking over at warp speed, it’s a long game. In order to move around, craft your deck and player board, and build everything you’ll need to boldly go, you end up needing a lot of actions.

Every other player is trying to (largely) do the same as you, so strategy really comes to the fore. If your plans hang by a thread, due to you needing to build on a certain moon or asteroid, and someone gets there first, it’s like someone poking holes in your spacesuit. It’s a great example of indirect player interaction, perfect for the sort of person who doesn’t like the warfare of something like Twilight Imperium.

Solo play

SpaceCorp comes with a very slick solo opponent. Its turns are dictated by flipping cards, and instead of adding in a separate solo deck, as many games do, SpaceCorp does something clever. On the bottom of each of the cards of the three decks in the game (one per era) are the instructions for the bot of another era. Flip a card, consult the reference card, and do what it tells you to. It’s absolutely effortless to run, which is my biggest prerequisite in a good automa opponent.

The bot does a good job of letting you practice the game, and it’s neither too easy nor too difficult to beat, which is great. My biggest disappointment with the bot is that it doesn’t really mirror how a human would play. As an example, if you want to build somewhere, you need to move one of your cubes there. If you’re playing against a person, when they move a cube somewhere, you’ve got a reasonable idea of the sort of thing they might be up to. The bot, however, is random, so it’s next turn might be something else on the opposite side of the board.

It’s not a dealbreaker for me. I still get to play a great game on my own, and learn how to build the engines of industry that’ll propel me to intergalactic glory. Just don’t expect an opponent that feels clever.

Final thoughts

SpaceCorp 2025-2300AD is a very good space exploration game. It captures that same feeling of near-future sci-fi that Terraforming Mars does, for example, but it feels much more thematic. A large part of that is due to the way nothing dives into too much detail. There’s no over-the-top explanation of how the refineries look, or what they do – they’re just a cardboard disc you drop on the board. That’s just one example, but this abstraction allows you to focus on the bigger picture: your corporate machinations in space.

I was so surprised at the relative lightness of the game, especially with it coming from GMT. It’s not light light, it’s a solid middleweight game, but it’s a game you can teach to someone and have them compete at in the same night. I love the fact you can just stop after one or two eras if you don’t have enough time to play all three, and still have the experience of having played a full game, not just a part of one. On the flip-side of this, the way certain things carry over from one era to the next means that it doesn’t feel like three disjointed games, one after the other.

Clear iconography, great reference cards, three different boards, a ton of cards and so many different ways to approach the game. There’s a lot to like about SpaceCorp. The solo bot is a great addition, with the caveat I mentioned above, and I love the way the options available expand in-line with your own exploration. I remember feeling genuine tension at the first time I had to cross the radiation zones on the Planeteer board. For a game that looks as plain as this does at times, it draws you in like you wouldn’t believe.

If you want a sci-fi theme and a ruleset that won’t make your brain dribble out of your ears, SpaceCorp 2025-2300AD is the way to go.

Review copy kindly provided by GMT Games. Thoughts and opinions are my own. All photographs ©Scott Mansfield.

SpaceCorp 2025-2300AD (2018)

Designer: John Butterfield
Publisher: GMT Games
Art: Chad Jensen, Kurt Miller, Douglas Shrock, Mark Simonitch
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 60-240 mins

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