2025 - A Space Odyssey

Friday night, and four of us slipped into our cosmonaut suits and saddled up (space parlance) to hit the stars - Joe, Matt, Ian, and myself (Sam).

The game in question was SpaceCorp, GMT's light (on the rules, not the playtime) undertaking. The board shows your illustrious paths through the universe, but everything is driven by cards - to move a 'team', you need a Move card. To explore, you need an Explore card - and so on. Once you've built bases you can also exploit them by running production - again, cards.

This leads to a Quest For El Dorado-style dilemma in each turn, get some more lovely cards, or use them up? The potential saving grace is your infrastructure - cards you build in order to have them at your disposal on every single turn. But the twist with that is anybody can use your infrastructure for their business too - a kind of reticent co-op-in-space - although you do at least get a precious reward when they do - one card, off the top of the deck.

Joe improved his infrastructure early and found himself the recipient of a steady drip of cards as we all borrowed from him. Ian was first to the Moon, I was first to Mars (finding life!). Building a base there got me the first reward of a Business Contract - these are the goals of the game, simple objectives in the main that first-player-to-do gets a cash reward for. And as we told onlooking Stan when he said the scoring (cash) was a bit underwhelming compared to the theme (the universe) - that's reality, baby.

A small problem - identified by Joe about three hours later - was that I'd laid out the Business Contracts for 1-2 players, not four. That kind of oversight would have got me fired from NASA, but it was too late now - we were out there and picking up speed. I sailed into a strong early lead and Matt was lagging behind when we finished the first board (Mariners), and began the second of the game (Planeteers) where we aim for the outer reaches of our solar system.

Now things change slightly, with Advancements and Breakthroughs available to power-up: use an infrastructure without gifting the owner a card, for instance, or have Move or Build values at your disposal. The planets and moons become harder to reach and, once there, exploit.

I rushed ahead again, looking to get rewards for improved infrastructure. Joe and Ian went for contracts around the outer planets, and Matt did a neat one-two combo of building bases on the nearby asteroids, before hyperspacing himself out to Pluto.

Then the third board arrived, where things get a bit more intersting/less interesting (we couldn't decide) as we hurtle across massive voids to reach distant stars, and employ a great new breakthrough in space-travel: multiplication, as we can now multiply one movement card by others. This is vital, because whereas Earth to the Moon is a movement value of four, traversing galaxies can cost up to 200 points or more.

We also access a new action - colony building. This was where the games' state changed slightly from exploratory to Euro-y, as the final board seemed more of an exercise in point-scoring than the others. For me, I didn't mind the colony-building and majority-scoring per se, but the individual abilities of a colony (score when another player builds a colony, for instance, even though that was the one that kept me competitive) somewhat broke the thematic immersion.

That said, discoveries are still there to be discovered, and Joe stumbled on one that explained the protracted nature of the third board - in my now slightly-wine-fuelled state, I'd put out far too many colony tiles, including some of those for a two-player or solo game.

I'd surged ahead on the scoring but there was a triple twist in the tale: first, Joe ran production at three bases and caught me up, and overtook me on the last few turns. Then Matt spent his last turn building a colony, scoring me a point in the process, and putting me level with Joe: a tie! But then, checking the rules, we saw in a tie the most valuable colonies determine the winner, and that was Joe. I didn't note down the scores but it was something along the lines of:

Joe 64 (wins on tie)
Sam 64
Matt 52
Ian 51

Despite our confusion over the final board (sorry again guys!) we'd all enjoyed it, and everyone (apart from me - I could see the clock) was surprised to see it was half-past midnight! SpaceCorp had taken us five hours to complete, which was probably more than anyone was anticipating. But I think a second play - with familiarity and without my set-up errors - would speed it up considerably and I'd expect it to play in three.

Thanks all, a lot of fun and some great spacey soundtrack suggestions from Ian (S U R V I V E) and Joe (Stars of the Lid).