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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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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“Why haven’t I heard anything about this game?”

I had just finished my second game of Shackleton Base: A Journey to the Moon (2024, Sorry We Are French), but it was the first play for the guys in my review crew. We had a lengthy post-game discussion that started with the thoughts of my buddy Eric, who marveled at the quality of the design and the interesting choices all of us got to make during the course of our 18-turns-per-player experience.

I had a good feeling about Shackleton Base when I met with one of the game’s designers, Fabio Lopiano, at the Festival International des Jeux back in February 2024. Fabio was leading a demo of Shackleton Base when I had a meeting with the Sorry We Are French marketing team at the show.

Fabio and I talked for about 20 minutes, mostly about Shackleton Base but also about the game Autobahn; both were games co-designed by Fabio as well as Nestore Mangone (Darwin’s Journey, Newton). Despite some very fiddly components, I was really impressed by the gameplay of Autobahn and particularly the way scoring was executed with its focus on ladder-climbing executives moving into higher positions within a corporation by the end of play.

…

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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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As I contemplate Moon—note: I did not say the Moon as if I were stealing Li Bai’s drinking partner, but rather the drafting game known as Moon—I ask myself what keeps me from giving it the fifth star. I don’t give fifth stars very easily. I admit, I find many games enjoyable, but few worthy of such supreme recognition. The third title in Haakon Gaarder’s approachable-game-in-a-clean-white-box series (Villagers, Streets) is a contender for that elusive perfect score.

Welcome to my moon base

Moon is a card drafting game that, on the surface, gives me notable Fantastic Factories vibes, swapping the dice for passing hands of cards. The progression involves building an expanding base (literally) of resources and requisite flags that open the door to special abilities, engine exchanges, and endgame point feasts. More than the mechanisms, the charm of the illustrations and the simplicity of the iconography repeatedly hearkens to the ethos of the Factories.

The vague and inexplicable connection breaks down completely, though, in looking at the various mechanisms. Players build their moon base by passing hands of cards to the left, choosing either to build a card for lasting gain or assimilate—discard—one for a small boon. In order to build a card, players must spend any required resource tokens and match stated flag requirements.…

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I’ve been on a hunt to play as many games from the purported “4X Family” on BoardGameGeek as possible. Over the last three years, I’ve added quite a few 4X plays to my arsenal, and when an opportunity arose to grab a review copy of Empires of the Void II (2018, Red Raven Games), I scooped one up.

First, let’s talk 4X. This family was created on BGG based on the idea that many large-scale adventure/exploration games feature a bunch of the same elements. First, you’ll eXplore a mostly undiscovered map, featuring a “fog of war” or maybe face-down tiles that need to be touched by a player’s civilization members, a spaceship, etc. to be discovered. Area control elements enter play as players eXpand their presence on the map as it is revealed.

eXploitation takes place as player factions do their best to make use of the map’s natural resources…and in some of the 4X games I’ve tried recently, this is where engine building really shines. Finally, conflict leads to players attempting to eXterminate each other and possibly the locals who currently possess a given territory, as everyone tries to make a land grab for the map’s best spaces. Extermination usually leads to major consequences for the loser of these combat scenarios.

The 4X family of games…

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Starship Interstellar has the parts that usually pique my interest in a game. It’s a murderer’s row of absolute bangers: abysmal graphic design, comically overlarge pieces, cubes of every shape, size, and color, and space exploration!

That might sound sarcastic, but my too-cool-for-school brain is almost immediately titillated when I encounter something that looks like a terrible product on its face. It made it to publication, so surely, there must be something to it, right?

I often hit more than I miss with this assessment, but this time it was a dramatic strikeout. My wager that goofy-looking things are often good was dead wrong.

[caption id="attachment_299691" align="alignnone" width="1024"] The table hog when I was teaching myself the game.[/caption]

Starship Cubepusher

Here’s how the game works: There’s a giant map of the solar system with 8 planets that will move around in orbits each round. You have a personal supply of fuel and resources, and a ship that you can load said fuel and resources onto, shooting it out into space to attempt to mine various planets.

Why are you doing this? Well, the sun is going to explode because we mined it too much, and we need to build an ark to escape.

To do that, we must first take Action…

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Cosmic Encounter is a classic. It is a bright and shining star in the history of board game design. When I introduce the game to new players, I have encountered a few who hear ‘variable player powers’ and begin to doze off. I get it. The idea of an asymmetric game allowing players to break the rules in unique ways is fairly common these days.

These days.

Set the wayback machine to 1977, however, and this game is nothing short of revolutionary. It’s like the film Citizen Cane. Kids watching it for the first time today look at how the story unfolds, how it was filmed, what it does, and they have no idea! They think it’s quaint, or even old fashioned, but they do not see the greatness. They fail to grasp how every movie they watch in a theater or over some streaming service today owes that film a sizable debt. It is not a stretch to say that modern cinematic storytelling began with Citizen Cane. Likewise, the modern concept of variable player powers and asymmetric game design began with Cosmic Encounter.

Let’s take a look at this masterpiece.

A Little History

[caption id="attachment_298973" align="aligncenter" width="600"] The science fiction game for everyone.[/caption]

The original Cosmic Encounter was published…

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[caption id="attachment_297454" align="aligncenter" width="500"] Catan: Starfarers The Box[/caption]

In 1995, Klaus Teuber introduced Settlers of Catan, to the world. It won the Spiel des Jahres that year and, without a trace of hyperbole, changed board gaming forever.

Four years later, Teuber launched his game into outer space with The Starfarers of Catan. This version included a much larger board with planetary systems, new resources to gather, and one large rocket per player. Unfortunately, the production aspects let the game down. The rocket and the pieces that attach to it often broke through repeated play. As a result, Starfarers disappeared from shelves, leaving a mixed legacy behind.

In the years since then, Settlers of Catan has been renamed Catan with many, many expansions. People like me, who had long heard of Starfarers as being better than standard Catan, waited patiently for a Starfarers reprint. In 2019, that reprint finally hit the stores. It came with improved plastic pieces and a modular board. 

But, is Catan: Starfarers really any good? And could it possibly be better than Catan?

Let’s get it to the table to see for ourselves, shall we?

Setup

You’ll start by building the game board. It comes in six 11” x 11” puzzle…

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Aldebaran Duel is a two-player game where two opponents face off as leaders of space fleets vying for control over a newly available planetary system. Over three epochs, the players will discover new planets, populate them, use their mineral wealth to build spaceships, and try to gain superiority over their opponent.

A Race For the Galaxy

In the game, the players use multi-use cards to purchase other cards from a card offering (by discarding cards from their hand) in order to increase their movement along several technology tracks—many of which will help reduce the cost of future cards. At the end of each epoch, an interim scoring will be performed to determine who has the greatest military might, and also who has mastered the art of trade and diplomacy. These criteria will move a marker around a grid on a shared board. Where the marker ends its movement determines who receives victory points, as well as how many.

At the end of the third epoch, players will do a final scoring. In addition to the points received from the trade/military/diplomacy scoring, players will earn points based on how well they moved along the various resource tracks (as well as from a couple of other sources). And, when the cosmic dust settles, the player with the most points will…

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MLEM is a push-your-luck game with straightforward rules. Every round, each player loads one of their cats onto a rocket ship, starting with the commander for that mission and moving clockwise around the table. The choice of cat matters, since each has a unique power, but we’ll come back to that.

[caption id="attachment_295630" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Full team present and accounted for.[/caption]

Once the rocket is fully manned, the commander gets rolling. The mission starts with six dice, rolled all at once. The results are grouped by value—all the twos together, all the threes, and so on—and the commander decides which groups get used to move the rocket forward. There are a few things to keep in mind here.

The first: the rocket moves the sum of the values of the used dice. If the commander uses two ones and a three, the rocket moves five spaces. The second: used dice are removed from the pool for the rest of the mission, and in order to use any die showing a given value, you have to use all the dice showing that value. The third and final thing: only the values shown on…

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Council of Shadows is a 2022 release published by alea (intentionally not capitalized), the strategy games imprint of hobby games and puzzle-producing giant Ravensburger. I got a copy a few months ago and cleared my fall convention haul before getting Council of Shadows to the table.

Part of why I waited, though, was tied to the lack of buzz for this game, which I thought was strange given alea’s pedigree. Over the last two decades, alea has published games such as Puerto Rico, The Castles of Burgundy and The Princes of Florence, amongst dozens of other greats. When Council of Shadows hit the US market in early 2023, I didn’t even know about it until our Ravensburger partners brought the game to my attention.

I got in three plays over the course of just two days, and I mostly like what’s here. Council of Shadows is a bit uneven thanks to its approach, and while it is a game I recommend, I have questions about some of the design choices. Council of Shadows also left some players exasperated by the scoring system, which is both a feature and a bug, depending on your point of view.

All-Knowing

Council of Shadows is a little tricky to…

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I knew it by the end of my single Cycle demo play of Voidfall during SPIEL 2022: Voidfall was going to be great.

The only question I needed to answer, after backing the Galactic Box deluxe edition of the game and playing it 14 times—once for each of the included factions—was whether this was going to be my favorite game of 2023 or not.

I’ve already written 9,840 words about Voidfall, so if you have specific questions about individual parts of my experience, check out the links at the bottom. In this review, I’ll quickly summarize my thoughts on my Voidfall experience.

1. Voidfall is the best design Mindclash has ever produced. Although I enjoy two of their other designs quite a bit, Trickerion: Legends of Illusion and Anachrony, Voidfall feels incredibly well balanced, deeper than their other games, and is tied to a core that still excites me so many plays into the experience.
2. In terms of the marriage of gameplay to production, Voidfall is the hands-down winner in this category for 2023. If this were a metric tracked by BGG, it would get a perfect score. As a value proposition, Voidfall has no peer. You could play it 100 times and still not…

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