But whereas that was kind of Lords of Vegas in Space, in Orbit there's a more exploratory vibe: each player (it plays up to six) takes charge of a space agency circa 1960 and heads for the stars. The agencies have some mild asymmetry to them, so from the get-go you each have slightly divergent paths to travel. And this asymmetry is heightened somewhat by everyone getting a Pioneer card that gives them bonus points - if they're the first to achieve it.
Outside of that, everyone's aims are initially the same: to win the propaganda war by being the first to reach Mars, Venus, and beyond. Essentially, it's a multi-directional set of races, where meeting achievements at the seven other planets - flybys, orbits, landings or the tough-to-do return to Earth - score points. But because being the first to reach an achievement also allows you to improve the functionality of your rockets, there's a flux to what happens on the board - you might spot that NASA are going to beat you to Neptune, say, so you change direction and for Saturn instead. Nobody's orbited Saturn yet!
The problem with changing direction, of course, is that it costs. Every time you manoeuvre a rocket - changing direction, going into orbit, landing or launching - it costs fuel, and fuel is heavy and hard to come by. At the start of the game you'd be lucky to have more than one fuel with a rocket, and once it's spent it's spent, meaning your astronauts ends up floating in the firmament, waiting to be retrieved.
After you've moved and manoeuvred all of your rockets, you get to take a single action.
There are only four of them: make a minor improvement back at your space agency, retrieving as many 'lost' rockets as you like, building new rockets, or risking mission cards.
Your agency has four dials showing the speed your rockets can move at, how much fuel they can carry, how many actions it takes to actually build one, and how many points you score for reaching an achievement. This is where the asymmetry rears it's potentially frustrating head - while strong in other areas, for instance, it's critical for China to improve their point-scoring capacity early on, or achievements won't score them anything. So improving the functionality is important - and you'll notice (below) that it often takes more than a single action to do so.
NASA halfway to doubling their build capacity
Retrieving rockets simply gathers your fuel-less lost souls from the board and plonks them back at the start of the building path, and the Build action pushes them along it - a higher build score gets your rocket ready to launch that much quicker.
Finally, taking Mission cards is rather like extra routes in Ticket to Ride: there's a luck-pushing aspect to them because you pick up two cards and must keep at least one of them. Just like TtR, this can be risky - especially later in the game as uncompleted missions count against you in the final scoring. Conversely, you might just pick up a mission you've already completed...
So the actions are quite simple, but - outside of the idea of retrieving rockets - they all have a thematic sense to them, and keep the game moving along quickly. The puzzley aspect is on the main board though - at the end of every round, all the planets move along their orbital paths and planning your rockets' movements around this is what I find so engaging.
The game has exactly 24 rounds - half of Neptune's orbit - so the end is calculable, and there's a ramping up of momentum as the board fills up with various rockets, each hoping to maximise their use on a minimum of fuel. I'm a sucker for the look of it and I love the theme too.
Correction: not like Ticket to Ride
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