Designed by Thomas Lehman
Description:
The players all compete to explore the galaxy by exploring new worlds and developing new technologies. Each turn each player chooses one action, but the others will share in the actions chosen. In the end, the player with the most points is the winner!
My thoughts:
We played this game three times last Saturday, but, for the record, we probably should have quit after the second. It’s a blast, just three games is too many. Exploring or conquering new planets, producing and selling goods and purchasing developments all get you victiory points. The player with the most points at the end wins.
This games takes a little while to get a hang of, but after you know how the basics work, there are a wide variety of strategies to win. You can play the military strategy and just take over as many planets as possible, and, hopefully, pick up a development that gets you extra points. You may base your game on producing and consuming goods. The choices right now seem endless. I’m sure we’ll settle in to a few strategies that work for us, but the game is still relatively new in our rotation.
The base game is for 2-4 players, but we play with The Gathering Storm expansion, which expands it to 1-5 players. I have only played it with 4-5 players and it’s really a great game. It seems to just get more enjoyable the more you play it. It usually takes us about an hour to play with 5 adults. The game is rated for ages 12 and up, which seems about right to me. It’s a card- based game, but you need a fair amount of space to play it, since you have a cheat sheet, an array of up to 14 cards in front of you, a draw pile and a discard pile.