Do you like sci-fi themes in your tabletop experiences? If so, I think 2024 has been an exceptional year. Shackleton Base: A Journey to the Moon might end the year as the best Euro-style strategy game I got to the table. SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence was great as well, especially at lower player counts. Maybe you’ve heard of a little-known game called Arcs? Heck, as good as Arcs was, it didn’t excite me the way Andromeda’s Edge did.

In other years, any one of those games might end up being the year’s best game. I’m already stressed out as I think about which of the above-mentioned games is my favorite of the bunch.

You’ve probably heard the expression “it’s all about timing” and in the case of the new sci-fi themed strategy game From the Moon (2024, La Boite de Jeu), the timing for my plays could not have been much worse.

That’s not because From the Moon is bad. In fact, across my two review plays (I tried From the Moon with four players and once solo before realizing I didn’t need a third play to know where I landed), I knew just a few turns in that the game was a by-the-numbers worker placement game that had shades of area majority scoring…

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A few years back I was wandering through various campaigns on Kickstarter (as I am wont to do) and I saw a pair of images that were right up my alley. The images were sci-fi but of the old 1930s to 1950s variety. The sort of images that invoke some of my childhood heroes!

[caption id="attachment_307619" align="aligncenter" width="600"] A return to the golden age of sci-fi![/caption]

Pulp Invasion! I read the description of the game and saw that it was a solo affair. I decided to get two copies: one for me, and one for my friend, Steve (Steve loves solo gaming). I started getting the expansions, too. I stopped, but that is another story (see below).

This game (and Pulp Detective) came about after Mr. Sanders acquired the rights to a whole bunch of pulp magazine covers and interior illustrations. In other words, this is the real deal! These are not modern artists mimicking the pulp era styles, these are authentic pulp era pieces. And they are beautiful!

Engage the hyperdrive!

In Pulp Invasion, you are a Free Captain, a sort of trader and mercenary who roams interstellar space. However, you are no ordinary Captain! In secret, you are an agent of the Intergalactic Council, an arm of the…

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I was starting to sweat just a tad.

My buddy John and I were doing a two-player game of SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (2024, Czech Games Edition), and we had just finished a quiet first round of play. SETI is a hand management, area control Eurogame and the first round was breezy—a couple quiet turns as we launched probes into the galaxy to explore planets in search of trace amounts of data that could lead to the discovery of E.T., or something.

It wasn’t offensive, but SETI wasn’t all that interesting either. “This game is going to go fast,” John said. “It doesn’t feel like we are ever going to have any resources to do more stuff, though.”

I had the same concern. I sent a probe to Mars, which meant I had a satellite figure on a cool-looking map of planets off to the side of the main space board, and I scored a few points and got a minor bonus or two. Otherwise, things were quiet. We finished that first round and got an income of a few credits, some energy to power probe movement, and a random card draw.

The second round wasn’t much different. We each took four actions and discovered new technologies, which made our collection of space data a little juicier. One…

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Starmada is a set of rules that allows you to design starships, then (with some miniatures or chits on a hex grid) send them out to reduce other starships to so much space debris. The idea of the game is to be a quick playing, tactical, and universal set of rules for such things. The system for ship design has basic components and myriad add-ons allowing it to simulate just about anything you can think of in a way that ensures that even if you and your friends are simulating different universes, the relative strengths of the ships can be calculated to ensure a fair fight. Want to put a fleet of Star Wars Super Star Destroyers up against a group of Star Trek Borg Cubes or perhaps a few Babylon 5 Vorlon Planet Killers? This game can do that.

Disclaimer: I am a member of the Admiralty—the group of volunteers that Daniel Kast (Majestic XII Games) brought together to take Starmada X rules and use them to create a new edition of Starmada a bit over a decade ago. Daniel and the members of the Admiralty were all people that loved many of the previous editions of the game. We each had our thoughts on where the strongest and weakest areas of…

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The best board game I played in 2021 was Dwellings of Eldervale (2020, Breaking Games). It did everything I wanted in a board game—lots of combat, a fantasy setting, Euro-like engine building elements, player powers and cards that all felt a little “broken”, cool miniatures, and Game Trayz. I played it four times that year and was sure it was one of the best games ever made, at least in terms of my play preferences.

Dwellings of Eldervale has the kind of randomness that is fun because the stakes were often quite low. Even when players lose in combat, they seem to always get something useful, and getting damaged units back was as easy as taking a recall action. Sure, that recall action is better when your units are healthy when they return to your play area, but over the course of a three-hour game, everyone took their licks from time to time.

At PAX Unplugged two years ago, I had the chance to demo Andromeda’s Edge, the updated version of Dwellings that changed the setting to space and made mostly minor changes to a variety of the original game’s design elements. Like Dwellings, Andromeda’s Edge is designed by Luke Laurie (adding Maximus Laurie as a co-designer this time around) and Andromeda’s Edge continues to utilize my favorite…

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Don’t tell my erudite friends but skirmish games, in particular, Star Wars: Imperial Assault, got me back into board gaming (even though I find the entirety of the modern Star Wars franchise unbearably boring). I love pushing miniatures around on a grid of some kind and making them shoot each other.

Now, I do love Star Trek, the show about people solving problems with talking, and I’m happy to say that if you’re looking for a highly approachable two-player skirmish game, Star Trek: Away Missions fits the bill. While the way you win can feel slightly disjointed as a game, it often ends up feeling more in the spirit of a Star Trek set piece, where a character has to perform some jargon-filled objective while dodging phaser fire.

Yellow Alert

Away Missions has you selecting your team from amongst Romulans, Klingons, Borg, and Federation factions. For this review, I had access to the starter kits for each. As I understand it, you can get other collections of minis which add characters you can swap in, more cards to build your decks with, and additional options for objectives.

You have a deck of Support Cards, and a deck of Mission Cards. The former contain various pieces of equipment that you…

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I don’t know that I’ve ever played a more divisive game than Arcs. Cole Wehrle's latest design, unquestionably the most-anticipated board game of 2024, won’t even be out at retail for another two months, but seemingly everyone has already played it, and seemingly everyone has an opinion. Most of those opinions are strong.

This is becoming de rigueur for Wehrle releases. While Root and Pax Pamir are consensus classics—even the people who don’t like them wouldn’t generally argue that they’re bad—Oath had a stark divide between fanatics and detractors. You don’t meet many people who think Oath is “fine” and have nothing more to say on the matter. Arcs, from my experience so far, is plowing a similar furrow. For every “I enjoy Arcs, and would happily play it any time” or “Arcs is the greatest board game ever made” you hear, there exists an “I get what it’s trying to do, but I don’t think it does it” or “Oh, I hate Arcs” to balance it out.

It is now my job to not only reconcile these viewpoints, but to assign an objective numerical value to my play experience. It is my job to solve Arcs. Sure. Simple enough.

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The Corporate Lunar Race

Lunar Rush is a thrilling simultaneous–play worker placement/bidding game for up to four players. In it, players take on the roles of megacorporations that have recently discovered the valuable crystals and ore hidden on the Moon. As they are wont to do, the corporations throw care aside in a mad dash to the moon to open shipping lanes, build moon bases, and ultimately increase their profits. 

Each round in Lunar Rush, players bid for initiative using bid cards. From highest to lowest, bidders win priority in turn order and pay the cost for their bids. Different routes will arrive at different times. Fast routes arrive almost immediately but can hold less cargo. Conversely, slow routes take a few turns to reach their destination but can carry more stuff. Then, in turn order, players choose any available route to claim. Routes are either moonbound or earthbound, referring to whether they are leaving to head to the Moon from Earth or vice versa. After everyone has chosen two routes, players simultaneously load up their ships on Earth with astronauts (workers) or items needed for modules and upgrades, and then they move their ships from Earth along the routes to the moon. Afterward, the moon phase happens simultaneously, with players building modules and producing resources. Each player begins…

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“How was it for you?”

I looked up from behind my small player screen; my buddy Rex had asked the question. I was still processing, as I had just served as the AI player during a recent set of three back-to-back plays of AI Space Puzzle (2024, Portal Games).

AI Space Puzzle is a cooperative deduction game. The theme is loose enough to be nearly non-existent: one player is the damaged AI of a spaceship bound for trouble unless the astronauts of the ship can decipher the cryptic clues provided by the AI to ensure that each room of the ship is correctly unlocked using the proper security keys. (Abstract? Yep.)

AI Space Puzzle is really two games in one. The AI player is playing the first game and will have plenty to do in order to get the right astronauts in the right rooms in just the right number of turns, usually eight turns or less. With a small pile of communication tokens, the AI can hint at the best ways to solve each scenario, hoping that the mix of clever clues and a sprinkle of luck will win the day.

The astronauts are playing a different game, a game that sometimes has a good amount of downtime. The AI’s processing power is the speed at which…

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At last year’s SPIEL event in Essen, Germany, I had the chance to try The Warp, a game I followed during its crowdfunding campaign because I was intrigued by its approach to the 4X genre of spacefaring adventure games (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate). The campaign, which ended in late 2020, gave me the sense that there would be a real chance at being blown off the map, so the “eXterminate” portion of the 4X mechanic here looked real…and many games in this category do not really follow through on that promise.

I’ve now played The Warp in both three-player and four-player arrangements, and after these plays and a promising demo back in Germany, I know that The Warp does a lot of things well, particularly in the way objective scoring takes place. While it falls a tier below the best 4X and 4X-adjacent games I have played, such as Voidfall, Scythe, Circadians: Chaos Order and Eclipse: Second Dawn for the Galaxy, I think The Warp delivers on many fronts.

The real challenge? Finding it, especially if you live in North America.

“Do You Want to Follow?”

The Warp is a relatively rules-light, 1-4 player area control and hand management experience that can be…

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If you’ve had the chance to read any of my previous Mindclash Games coverage, you probably think I’m a fanboy…and, you are right.

Mindclash has put out a bevy of bangers, including Anachrony, Trickerion: Legends of Illusion, and the granddaddy of them all, Voidfall. I wanted to try the 2022 release Perseverance: Castaway Chronicles Episodes 1 & 2, so I reached out to the Mindclash team to grab a review copy and I spent about a month working through both episodes.

The format is wild. Perseverance is a four-game series that will wrap up with a third and fourth episode later this year, so I wanted to get in now to ensure I know what’s going on when the new games are delivered to backers. Players take on the roles of leaders stranded on a remote island in the present day that also happens to be inhabited by dinosaurs. By the end of Episode 4, I’m guessing Perseverance (the name of the game’s deserted location) will be a full-blown city where dinosaurs and humans are living side-by-side, working together to further a shared way of life.

The backstory is richer than that, so while I’ll talk about both episodes in the first box, I won’t talk about the things that Mindclash always does better…

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What’s That Sound?

As you slowly regain consciousness, you become aware of a red glow enveloping you. You begin to recollect things. You're on a ship. You're part of a crew. You were in hibernation. But that sound is deafening. Is that the alarm?

As you step out of your stasis pod into the hibernatorium, you become even more aware of your surroundings. You're now sure that's the alarm. The red emergency lights bathing everything in crimson are a definite tell. Your crew mates are also emerging from their pods. But, wait. Is that?

One of your crew mates has been removed from their pod, and their body lies cold, lifeless, and mangled on the metal floor. Your mind is suffering from short-term amnesia from the deep sleep, so when one of your crew suggests that you all should investigate, this comes with some pangs of anxiety. You're not even sure you remember these hallways.

The engine room and bridge are simple enough, since one is always in the back, and the other is always in the front. But the locations of the rest of the rooms are fuzzy right now. Everyone else is already going their separate ways, so you pick a dark hallway and move forward.

It was a short trip before you reached the armory. While…

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