If you’ve never played Echidna Shuffle, there are two things you need to know. Firstly, it has the cutest board game pieces in existence. Secondly, it’s incredibly interactive and very mean. Those of you who’ve played it know it’s essentially cutesy divorce fuel. Orbit has a similar feeling in the way that every player can move each of the planets on the board, and that every player needs to visit every planet to win. Simultaneously moving the planets you need towards you, while moving those your opponents need away from them. But you are all doing this at the same time.

Sounds like unmitigated chaos, right? Well, yes, but also no.

Staaaar Trekkin’ across the universe

The Orbit game board looks like one of those scanner screens in the background of an 80s sci-fi movie. Planets on dashed, geometric paths. A grid of triangles covers the entire thing. I’ve been playing with a prototype version of the game, but the first thing that struck me is that it’s not very pretty to look at. The cards are bright and easy to read, but the board is a bit bleh. The really weird thing is that after a few minutes, you don’t even notice, because the board is really functional. The aesthetic brevity (for want of a better word) is a strength instead of a weakness.

On your turn, you play a card from your hand which does two or three things. Firstly, it moves one or more planets along its orbital path. It’s as simple as moving the wooden planet to the next spot on the dashed line. Secondly, it has a number. This is the number of junctions along the network of little triangles you can move your spaceship. Thirdly, you might have an extra icon which lets you do something fun, like reverse the direction of a planet’s travel. Chaotic orbital mechanics ripping entire solar systems to pieces – no biggie.

In the style of so many of Dr Knizia’s games – oh, didn’t I mention, it’s a brand new Reiner Knizia design? – the game mechanisms take a back seat and let the game play itself. Your turn is simple. Play a card, move a couple of pieces around, draw a new card. Choosing which card you play, and what you do with that card is where the joy of the game lives. At first it’s a case of “Well, I really want that red planet, so I’ll move it and then move towards it”, but very quickly the true game pops its head around the door like an intrusive neighbour. So much of Orbit depends on keeping an eye on what the other players are doing, and in turn, trying to second-guess what their next move is likely to be.

Tech? We don’t need no stinking te… oh wait, actually, we do

It’s a space game, so it’s got to have tech, right? It’s the unwritten rule. Orbit has techs to go after, but if the five-course, leather-bound menu of tech options in a game like Eclipse (review here) is your frame of reference, the tech offerings in Orbit are more like a blackboard leaning against a jacket potato van. Cheese, beans, cheese and beans. There’s some point-to-point warping, a pretty cool cannon which lets you zap off as far as you want in one direction. You get a couple of these by visiting certain planets, but in addition to that there are space station tiles strewn about the board. When you visit one it’ll either be a permanent tech for your player board or a warp or cannon for all to use.

Despite tech and powerups being a relatively small part of the whole package, they often become the most decisive part of the game. In the early parts of the game, there’s a feeling of every person for themselves, spreading out and looking for close clusters of planets to ping around, like pinballs trapped in a set of bumpers. It quickly becomes a game of side-eyeing your neighbours and opponents when they get down to one or two planets left to go. I love the way alliances are gossamer thin and last as long as a bubble. One moment Alice and Bob are trying to move planets out of the way of Carol, and then Alice jumps on a planet and only needs one more. Now it’s Team Bob & Carol forever! Or for another turn, at least.

No matter how well you keep your eyes on the space race in front of you, good players will spot an opportunity to use something like a warp to make a crazy play that nobody saw coming. Especially when you factor in being able to gain energy cubes, which you can spend a cube at a time to boost the number of steps you can move. The number of times you get blindsided is equal parts infuriating and amazing. If you start to think you’ve got the measure of the game after repeated plays with the same group you can flip the board over to spice things up. The orbital paths for the planets are different and have branches along the way, and it just messes with the basics enough to keep you thinking.

Modular design

I found after a few plays that even with the other side of the board there weren’t too many variables in the game. I’m a heavy Euro nut. I love it when there are a hundred things to tinker with and see what happens. Luckily, there are some extra modules in the box to keep things interesting.

Yay, good times!

The quickest and easiest is the Prism. The rulebook recommends it with two players, and I have to agree. All it does is add an additional, stationary planet to the board to visit, but it’s extra meat to keep you gnawing at the bone a little longer. The module that’s the most interesting in my opinion is the four-player partnership mode. It’s a bit like playing Bridge, with partners sitting opposite one another. Except the game is nothing like Bridge, but you know, other than that. A couple of bonus tiles like you teleport around the board to get things done.

The copy I was sent also has the Nebula expansion included, which I believe may be an additional extra. As long as it doesn’t bump the price too much, I’d say it’s definitely worth getting. There’s a navigation tokens module which helps speed the game up, and another that adds ‘nebula’ tiles to the board which is pretty cool. The nebulas bump planets along their tracks faster, while simultaneously blocking player ships from crossing those points.

The best extra though, and by far the coolest, is the Hyper Accelerator Engine Module. It just sounds cool. With this module, once you upgrade your energy capacity to the max you just shove all those tokens off your board and replace them with a gigantic engine tile. The engine means that any card you play that would add energy cubes to your board instead lets you rocket across the board in a straight line, and then use that card’s movement. I really like this module, because it helps with what is my biggest issue with the game, and that’s speeding up the endgame.

Final thoughts

Reiner Knizia is a machine. He just doesn’t know when to stop. Now it’s true that in the past not every game has been a hit, but his recent record is pretty flipping good. This year’s Cascadero (which I reviewed here) is one of his designs and it’s one of my favourite games of the year. Orbit is one of those games where at first you’d be inclined to say “Wait, this is a Knizia game? Really?”. It doesn’t feel like it has any of his hallmark mathematic stitching under the surface. But as you play, you start to feel the familiar player-driven interaction, with the push and pull of players trying to step over one another to get to the top, while simultaneously reaching out for a hand up.

Dyed-in-the-wool Euro gamers might not have a great time with Orbit. So much of the game is out of your direct control, and a lot of what you do is reactive. You can adapt a big strategy to try to steer parts of the game in the way you want it to go, but you have to remember that everybody else is trying to do the same thing. Despite this, and as counterintuitive as it might sound, it’s not a game of random chaos. A good player with good, reactive planning, will normally do better than a bad player.

Even if you’re a Knizia fan, there’s a good chance you don’t have one of his games set in space (although MLEM: Space Agency came out this year, so maybe). If you enjoy his games like the recent remake of Quo Vadis – Zoo Vadis – then despite the vastly different settings and apparent mechanisms, I think you’ll have a good time with Orbit. The same goes for those of you who played and burned out on Echidna Shuffle. Don’t get me wrong, I love that game, but by the end of the game, it can get pretty painful. Orbit feels similar to me but with much more space between the echidnas planets.

Bitewing and Reiner Knizia are doing some really clever stuff at the moment, and Orbit is another fine example. I prefer it with three or four players, for sure, so if it sounds like your groups kinda thing, check it out.

Preview copy kindly provided by Bitewing Games. Thoughts & opinions are my own.

Orbit (2024)

Design: Reiner Knizia
Publisher: Bitewing Games
Art: Vincent Dutrait
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 60 mins

The post Orbit Preview 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.

“The truest wisdom is a resolute determination”

So said Bonaparte, who knew a thing or two about combat strategy. Combat is a great place to start as we dissect Voidfall, because it’s where you’ll see the biggest difference between it and its peers, like Twilight Imperium. Combat in 4X games often sees players chucking handfuls of dice across the table at one another, praying to the chance cube gods for a favourable outcome. Combat in Voidfall is deterministic. If deterministic isn’t a word in your day-to-day vocabulary, it soon will be.

When you’re talking about a game, deterministic combat means that you already know the outcome of the encounter before it begins. You know what the defenders can do, you know what you can do as the aggressor, and you know what the board state will be in the aftermath. It’s a really important thing to bring up early because it’s the part that will likely make or break Voidfall for a lot of people.

Lots of people enjoy rolling dice. Part of that epic game experience is picking a fight with someone you have no right to win, but clinging on to that small chance that Lady Luck has blown kisses your way. Voidfall is a stark contrast. There’s no trench run with a torpedo down an exhaust vent here. You go full Death Star or you go home. That unknown quantity, the seeds of randomness sown into the soil of the 4X landscape, just isn’t there. Hearing all of this might have made the game sound dull, and there’s a chance you want to close this tab right now. I should know, I was one of those people.

When I first heard how my epic space battles’ outcomes were already carved in stone before my thrusters sputtered into life, I wasn’t exactly enthused. It sounded boring.

I was wrong.

Get your house in order

Each player represents a grand house in the game. A sci-fi race of intergalactic beings bent on ruling the cosmos. Each house is asymmetric in play style, each with its own perks, abilities, and suggested ways to play. Even the player boards that track your progress along the different tech tracks are different from one another. The nuts-and-bolts mechanisms in Voidfall are resource management, area control, and action selection. Sounds pretty Euro-gamey, right? That’s because it is. It’s a heavy Euro in disguise, gorging itself on thematic vol-au-vents at the buffet of an Ameritrash members-only party.

You’ve got a board covered in dials that track your resource levels and production rates. Thank goodness it’s there too, because having to manage five more types of tokens during the game would have been the tipping point in terms of what’s manageable.

In the main action phase of each of the game’s three cycles, you’ll take turns playing cards from your hand. Each card has three actions on it, some of which have costs, and you can pick any two of these actions to perform. The cards and actions have themes and names that help tie things together. Even without knowing the game, you can hazard a guess at the sort of things you can do with the Development and Conquest cards. Production isn’t a standard phase of the game however, as you might expect from a game of this ilk. If you want to produce resources with the various guilds you have strewn around the galaxy, you need to use one of your actions on one of your turns, and if you’re producing, you ain’t fighting.

It all stokes the fires that in turn power the engines of a good Euro game. Tech tracks and advancements, taking and fulfilling agenda cards, spending resources to build guilds and defenses on tiles. All the while trying to manage the orange corruption markers that invade the main board and your player boards. Then you’ve got the technology market where you can buy cards which, once again, add a layer of asymmetry to proceedings. All of a sudden you’ve got shields to soak up damage during fights, or missiles that let you deal damage before you even invade a hex. There is so much to try to keep track of.

A bridge too far?

Amazing as it may seem, I still haven’t talked about loads of things in the game. Population dice, trade tokens, and skirmishes – oh my! If you don’t like heavy games with lots of decision-making, where you’re trying to make a hundred tiny gears turn in unison, you’re not going to have a good time with Voidfall. In all honesty, I’d be surprised if you got through setting up and playing the tutorial. It’s a 3-4 hour assault on your cognitive abilities.

Even when you revel in this level of complexity – which I do – it’s still a force to be reckoned with. You’ll have an idea of what you want to accomplish in your next turn, and likely have 10-15 minutes to plan how to do it. But the cards are temptresses. Sirens, beckoning your brain onto the rocks of indecision. As you place card on top of card, stacking an action queue for the ages, you’ll see something that makes you think “Ooh, actually I could do this, couldn’t I?”, and by the time you return from that cerebral rabbit hole you’ve got no idea what your original plan was. Of course, by the time it gets back to your turn the game state will have changed again, and you can almost guarantee that someone else has clamped your war machine’s wheels, but that’s just what Voidfall is like.

The time and space commitments are genuine concerns too. Setting up a game of Voidfall is an undertaking that can easily take 30-60 minutes, depending on the number of players and the scenario you’ve opted for. It will also swamp your table. I don’t care how big your table is, Voidfall will devour the lot and insist on a wafer-thin mint to finish.

Did I mention that it’s an absolute pain to teach? There are a ton of concepts that you need to understand if you want to play. You need to understand that your production level and yield are two different things. You need to know about approach and salvo damage and mitigation in combat, on top of initiative. You need to understand how to calculate end-of-cycle skirmish combat values, and how fleets can be broken and regrouped. And the icons. Oh, the icons.

In addition to the rulebook, compendium, and glossary included in the box (40, 86, and 52 pages respectively), there’s a four-page icon reference sheet detailing 214(!) different icons used in the game. Two hundred and fourteen! Voidfall is not a midweek game for after the kids have gone to bed.

Final thoughts

You’d think that after that last section, I wouldn’t be recommending Voidfall. It’s an expensive, intense, time-hungry investment. But by the maker, is it worth it! Voidfall is a truly incredible game. If you can find a game to be a part of, I urge you to try it. Before you do, go over and watch the excellent how-to-play video from Paul at Gaming Rules!. It might take two full games to properly absorb the rules and iconography, but you’ll have such a good time getting there that you won’t care.

If I didn’t know the game was from the minds of Nigel Buckle & Dávid Turczi, who don’t seem to be able to put a foot wrong lately, I’d have sworn this was a Vlaada Chvátil game. The hex-based map, deterministic combat, card play, resources, and meticulous planning involved all make it feel like it’s what you’d get if he took Mage Knight and set it in space. Voidfall could so easily have tripped over its own feet if it weren’t for yet more sterling work in the graphic design department, thanks to Ian O’Toole. The man is some kind of wizard, I’m sure of it.

I could easily write twice the number of words I already have to try to explain the game better. I haven’t touched on the three different play modes, for instance. You can play competitively, cooperatively, and solo. The solo game runs smoothly and without too much overhead, and while I’ll be honest and say I haven’t had a cooperative game yet, the competitive mode is outstanding. When you consider the different houses and abilities, the pages and pages of scenarios on offer, and the different ways to play it, I can hand-on-heart say that the high price of the game is justified by its content, not just the amount of stuff in the box.

Hype games come and hype games go. I have a personal guideline which means I steer clear of heavily-hyped games for the first few months after release, just to see if people are still talking about them when the latest shiny trinkets are thrown before them. People are still talking about Voidfall, and I believe people will still be talking about Voidfall in the coming years too. It’s nothing short of spectacular. I recently played a four-player game at a convention which took close to four hours to complete. When we finished there was a palpable deflation, and had we not all had other games to go and play, I think we’d have all happily reset the game and played again immediately. Voidfall is that good.

You can buy this game from my retail partner, Kienda. Remember to sign-up for your account at kienda.co.uk/punchboard for a 5% discount on your first order of £60 or more.

Voidfall (2023)

Design: Nigel Buckle, Dávid Turczi
Publisher: Mindclash Games
Art: Ian O’Toole
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 120-240 mins

The post Voidfall Review appeared first on Punchboard.

All aboard

It’s the future, right? Passenger space travel is a thing, and some bright spark has come up with a wormhole fabricator. The fabricator enables the captains of the spaceships to punch a hole in the fabric of space, and stitch the two ends together, allowing instantaneous travel between two points. It’s a pretty cool concept, and every time I face the drive from Cornwall to Harrogate for Airecon (which I wrote all about here), I wish it were real. As the captain of your own interstellar Uber your job is to take passengers (cards, in Wormholes’ case) to their destinations. If you’re lucky, you’ll end up with a handful of passengers who all want to go to the same planet, gaining you lots of points for one trip.

Wormholes are tunnels, and the thing about tunnels is that they have a hole at either end. So before you get all excited thinking “I’m going to take off and immediately warp to the edge of the known universe”, keep that enthusiasm in check. At any point in your turn, you can drop a wormhole token on the hex your spaceship is flying through. Wormhole tokens come in pairs, and as soon as you drop the second of a pair somewhere – punching a hole in the other end of the tunnel, if you will – the tokens are flipped and immediately active. From that point on, anyone landing on either end of the wormhole can warp to the other end for free!

Wormholes being a free trip is a big deal. On your turn you get three movements, and moving from one hex to another costs one of those movements. It means the first half of the game starts slowly as the players slowly spread out using movement points, searching for the right places to hitch either end of their interstellar ziplines. As the game progresses though, you soon start to realise that when wormholes butt up against one another, you can start to move really far with only a few movements.

Engage

Once the board starts to fill up with players’ wormhole tokens, you’re left with some painful – if not difficult – decisions to make. You might have a ship filled to the brim with passengers who want to go to the planet that looks like a fuzzy ball, but to get there quickly you’ll have to use other players’ wormholes. You can do that, and they can’t stop you doing it, but they’ll get VP chits by way of compensation for using their intergalactic highways. I had a really funny game of Wormholes with my wife and son, where my son deliberately ruined his chances of winning by refusing to use my wormholes. Rather than let me earn VPs, he went on a slow, spiteful crawl around the cosmos. So for those of you wondering “Can I just use my own network and avoid any interaction?” – no, you can’t. It’s baked-in, and it’s great.

The biggest issue I have with the game is the legibility of the wormhole tokens. In a game where being able to quickly trace routes across the board is key, some of them are really difficult to read at a glance. When a token goes on the board without a matching one, they start on a black side with a bright number, and things are good. When the wormhole is completed, the token is flipped and black is replaced with the player colour, and the number is a kind of silver colour. The silver is reflective and hard to read at a distance. The little arrow that points to the other token in a pair could do with being bigger too. Too many times I heard someone say “Where does this one go to?”, which shouldn’t be a question in a game dependent on that mechanism.

Gripes aside, Wormholes is a lot of fun. It plays out so quickly, which makes it perfect for a start or end game for a game night, and I’ve also found it really good for playing with non-gamers. I wondered if there’d be a min-max problem where cunning players were just taking on passengers who rely on their own routes, but the problem doesn’t exist. The end of the game is driven by players placing wormholes next to each planet, which also rewards bonus points, so it’s usually in your best interest to weave a wide web through the stars.

Final thoughts

I have two sets of shelves that I use to store games. The upstairs shelves hold my collection of Euro and wargames – the sort of games I’ll play with my regular group, or at a convention. The downstairs shelves are for family and party games – the games I know I can regularly get to the table with my family. Wormholes has earned a coveted spot on the downstairs shelves. If you were looking for a heavy space game to sit alongside Gaia Project, Eclipse, and Twilight Imperium, Wormholes isn’t it. This is a much lighter, more accessible game.

Regular gamers will enjoy the mixture of the initial planning of routes, and later trying to optimise their turns to milk every last point out of the game. Non-gamers might find the start a little slow-going on their first game, but just watch their eyes light up towards the end when they’re zipping all over the place. It’s a game which does a great job of making you feel like you’re enacting really clever plans, whereas it’s really just following the path of least resistance, but that’s a big part of hooking new gamers in. Make them feel like they did something clever.

I like the way the boards are double-sided and include different kinds of obstacles and features. It mixes things up enough to keep it interesting, without making it feel like a different game. AEG are undoubtedly one of the best at producing these light-mid weight games at the moment, and Wormholes happily sits alongside the likes of Cubitos (review), Whirling Witchcraft (review), and Peter McPherson’s other hit, Tiny Towns (review) as games which hide layers of strategy behind a newbie-friendly veneer. Speedy pick up and deliver action with a nice twist, I really like it.

Review copy kindly provided by Alderac Entertainment Group. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

Wormholes (2022)

Design: Peter McPherson
Publisher: Alderac Entertainment Group
Art: Caring Wong
Players: 1-5
Playing time: 45-60 mins

The post Wormholes Review 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

The post SpaceCorp 2025-2300AD Review appeared first on Punchboard.