To Orion in 2 Hours 55 Minutes

Andrew had missed last Friday's venture into SpaceCorp so we'd speedily planned a two-player expedition last night at my place. He arrived with everything and set up and ready to go, and for the sake of completeness I made sure I knew the rules as well (almost: Andrew spotted Spaceports change slightly on the Planeteers board). I explained them and off we went.

The early moves were mostly a lot of research, as if scientists knew the existence of fuel but couldn't yet calculate how much they needed. Then: Andrew flew to the moon, and I made my way to Mars. We were off! Stars of the Lid were playing on the stereo. The atmosphere was thin. Not even Little Joe coming in to pilfer crisps could break the spell.

As on Friday I surged into a reasonably substantial lead early on, reassuring Andrew - even as I inwardly swore victory - that I was catchable. I hit several business contracts whilst Andrew prepared his infra for the times ahead, and the Mariners board ended at the astonishingly early hour of 8.15, with children still roaming the house.

The second board (Planeteers) saw Andrew fall foul of the dreaded radiation, something my Radiation Resistant status helped me avoid. All his transiting and building kept hitting him with penalties for being unshielded and costing him cash - punishment perhaps for a high staff turnover and insurance payouts. We raced to discover water and life and Andrew won that battle. But I still took more Business Contract rewards as Andrew's income focused more on production.

Little over an hour had passed when Planeteers came to a close and Andrew was keen to continue, at least until he saw the (final) Starfarers board - it's a bit like playing Ludo and flipping it over to reveal Hansa Teutonica. Rules change, colonies can be built, more options abound. For the first time Andrew havered, but his havering was swiftly overcome by his sense of adventure - Let's go! he cried.

With the correct rules (see Friday for the wrong ones) Starfarers now played at a reassuringly logical pace, the sense of points-collection still present but not overwhelming the theme this time. Exploring my first destination only to find grumpy aliens there (the Introvs) I focused on a couple of contracts but also decided to get all my teams out to Orion before Andrew did - and I succeeded, scoring 15 points in the process. I also built more Colonies than Andrew, snaffling me five points during play and 8 at the end.

But my decision to basically remove teams from play (once in Orion, they can't return to the board) backfired, as Andrew made his way around the stars exploring for lots of little juicy rewards, beat me to a business contract I thought I was nailed-on for, and produced with his last turn to churn out six points - enough for a debut win!

Andrew 83 - Explorer Supreme
Sam 80 - Explorer's Curse

A lovely game, and done and dusted in under three hours. It wasn't even half past ten, and we'd conquered the planets (apart from the Introvs Aliens, who remained resolutely independent)

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).

Corp Reactor

I have now twice played through SpaceCorp, GMT's new surprisingly-light game about galactic exploration. Once, I even got to the end.

the end of SpaceCorp

In the game you head out into the firmament to explore, build bases, and make money. Really, that is the nub of it, as on some planets what you find there can be rinsed for cash (they have a production value) and others can't. But you still want to build bases there, for reasons that will hopefully become clear.

the start of SpaceCorp

Despite SpaceCorp enormous scope thematically and otherwise (big distances; lots of boards) the mechanics of it are simple: on your turn, take a single action. The actions are largely self-explanatory: move your ship, explore a planet, build a base, run production on bases (for cash), research for more cards. More cards is always good, because everything you want to do is facilitated by them. Cards played are gone forever, but there's a way to make sure you have some kind of feeble permanent economy in place by using infrastructure: these cards are face-up in front of you and can always be used, without being used-up. The minor catch is that any cards in your infrastructure can also be accessed by any other player as well.

Infrastructure: 2 Research; 5 Move

Also on your infrastructure are two evolving sciences - of sorts - in genetics and revelations. Your culture's progress on these front is represented by cubes travelling in circles - every revolution rewards you with a genetic advancement, or revolutionary breakthrough. These combine with, and improve, your infrastructure. Again, despite the big words, they're all pretty straightforward.

And actually, as we leave Earth, these juicy advancements are unavailable anyway, as they are hidden in an alternate dimension (the other side of the board). Mysterious...

Early doors

But what's the point of it all?

As much as the exploring and producing can get you cash, the bigger goal is the contracts: these are on a separate 'business' board, and are basically objectives: first to build a certain amount of bases, first to produce, first to upgrade three advanced cards, and so on. If the tactics of SpaceCorp is the turn-by-turn move/explore/build, the strategy is making sure they align with at least one of the contracts. And that's where the interaction in the game lies, as much as the borrowing of each other's infrastructure: nobody can be sure who has what cards in their hands, and so there's a hidden-knowledge element as to how close anyone is to completing a contract: once complete, it's done, and that reward can't be claimed any more.

contracts

But wait! We've only just started. We've left Earth and made it - possibly - as far as Mars, and discovered maybe some water and a volcano or two. We've built research bases (get cards!) refineries (more production) and spaceports (travel faster!) amongst other things, but greater things lie ahead. When six of seven contracts are completed (or the cards run out) this age comes to an end, and the 'Mariners' board flips over revealing those lovely breakthroughs and advancements. And we now move onto another board - Planeteers.

Look what we found

This plays out in much the same way, albeit with those additional tools being added to your armoury, there's a sense of momentum building into how much you can do with a single action. And momentum is needed, as the distances travelled are beginning to get much greater, and building (which has a cost) isn't quite so simple either. Once you get beyond Jupiter there's radiation to consider - ignoring it can be expensive -  and there's a sense that this game is turning from an explore and build experience into something more akin to a race. Hang around the asteroid belt and ignore the irradiated Ganymede if you like, but some of the juicier contracts encourage you further afield, until you're all the way out at the Oort Cloud, and on the verge of leaving our solar system entirely...

Which you do, because when this age ends (contracts done/cards run out, as before) there's a third board - Starfarers - which takes us out into the great beyond.

Starfarers

Here the basic tenets of the previous boards change a little, and a new action becomes available: building colonies. Movement values, as you might expect, become huge out here - but the cards for this age bring in new sciences that allow speed of light travel, or in card terms, multiplication. Arriving at a star system doesn't instantly allow exploration or building either, you have to kind of skid to a halt first. And you may find Aliens out here too: not warring types exactly, but scary enough to send your crew scuttling back home with their space nappies full.

It's the colony action though that completes the metamorphosis from gentle cosmos-discovery into bunfight: some colonies score points off other players, and all colonies score points at the game's end, which comes up faster than you think considering the huge deck of cards Starfarers has. In my play-through Green led the scoring pretty much throughout, and built three colonies to Blue's two for a whopping eight profit. But Blue won anyway courtesy of hitting the right contracts and spending their last three turns simply running production, as Green realized they couldn't get their second ship to the next great beyond (which is so far away it has no board, just 5T profit).

final scores - probably fairly abysmal ones

Last night I was in two minds about SpaceCorp. I really enjoyed playing it but when it finished there was a slight feeling that something was missing - it's a '3X' game, and without the 'exterminate' I wasn't totally sure there was enough there to make up for it. But I don't think it ever set out to be anything other that what it is - a story of travelling out into the cosmos and seeing what you find. And for the games I'd compare it to, it's more accessible than High Frontier, less brutally mathematical than Leaving Earth and just more fun than the bone-dry Kepler 3042. Although the board-flipping could be viewed as gimmicky, it does help give the sense you are moving further and further afield: the second and third boards introducing new elements prevent the feeling that you're just playing the same game three times.

And I love a game that tells a story, and especially so when it moves so fast - and SpaceCorp definitely ticks both those boxes. (Side note: there are rules to play just two or even a single board, but I think it would lose something in the process).