Back to the boardgame café. With
images; cc-by-sa on
everything.
We began with
Alien Frontiers,
in theory a game of the colonisation of Mars, but in practice
dice-based worker placement. It's not bad dice-based worker
placement, with a variety of ways to score points, but I fell into my
usual split between enjoying the theme of the game and mentally
stripping it away in order to concentrate more on the technical play.
You roll dice ("ships") and place them in squares ("docking ports") on
space stations; some of them demand multiples of the same die, or other
combinations. These get you energy, ore, more ships, and eventually the
ability to place colonies, which in turn get you bonuses related to a
single area (e.g. more energy from the solar collector, or faster colony
construction).
There are also alien artefacts, which mostly have two modes: spend
some energy to activate a minor effect, like turning one of your ship
dice a point up or down, or discard the card to activate a major
effect.
It is fun, and I'd be happy to play it again, but I wish it weren't
dressed up in a theme I like, especially with such a gorgeous board.
I'd like to play an actual game about the colonisation of Mars, and
this isn't it.
We went on with
Jupiter Rescue,
a fairly light cooperative board game. Aliens are invading the space
station, and gradually destroying it; the human crew are panicking.
It's up to the heroic maintenance robots to save the day, and get the
humans to the escape pod.
All the humans? Why, no, friend citizen, I am glad you mentioned that.
Only twenty-eight of the crew need to be rescued in order for the
mission to be considered a success. Indeed, quite a bit of the fun we
had playing this game was in characterising the robots, forced to save
the helpless and hapless humans.
There are various cards which give the robots special abilities, one
of them chosen as a permanent ability and others usable for a single
turn: I had "Pilot", which gave greater control over the escape pod.
As the aliens infested the station and bits broke off, we were able to
bring it in closer to the human survivors, which is good as they
needed to be commanded to move to it.
It's a simple game with no pretence at simulation, and the wording of
cards is often strangely ambiguous (odd, since the designer's
American), but it's strangely enjoyable. I don't suppose it'll find a
place on my shelf, but I had a good time with it nonetheless.
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