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Having never heard of this game up until a few weeks ago I managed to find someone willing to trade it to me and rushed it along on Wed evening for a first run. Hoping that the pictures of steampunk spaceships on the box would disguise the fact that the game mechanics were more el Grande and Citadels than lasers, space battles and wookies.
Speaking of wookies; Jon, Tonio and Andy all joined in for a game and after a brief recap of the rules (does anyone else feel pressure from the expectant-eyes-of-doom
gazing upon them when explaining games for the first time having not even played before themselves...? ... Just me then... (and Gareth, surely)
So to the game. Each player has 9 cards (characters) and plays/selects one each turn (blind bidding style). These cards will populate space ships on the launch-pad and once full the ships take off for Mars to a pre-set destination. Each character also has an extra ability (blow up a ship, change the destination, launch a ship that is not yet full etc). Once on Mars the colonists decamp and the game turns into an El Grande style area control as each region supplies certain resources (scoring from 1-3). At 3 distinct stages (5th, 8th and 10th rounds) each region is scored (simple majority wins). Rewards increase each scoring round and after 10 rounds that’s it. Oh and there are also bonus cards and ‘discovery’ cards which have modifiers for the regions... although these didn’t prove quite so popular as the game progressed.
And what did we discover ?
That Andy is very good at picking up new games. Wonder how he’ll get on playing Power Grid against Scott...
That, for once, Jon was unable to use his ninja like powers of persuasion to concoct a win.
That Tonio likes to sulk when things don’t go to plan...
(but soon perks up when he’s doing well 
)
That James, despite proclaiming that he hadn’t read any of the cards before, seemed to have a good grasp on what was going on.
That for some reason everyone decided to scrap it out in the same Mars region except for James, a bad strategy in El Grande and indeed a bad one here.
That blowing up spaceships in this game didn’t feel quite as much fun as it felt like it should.
That twice Tonio selected a character that resulted in him being unable to actually do anything once his turn came around... (did I already mention the sulking?)
That Jon was all excited about his bonus card rewards of 2 and 4 points until he saw James’s bonus cards of 6 and 8 points
That everyone decided soon afterwards that the bonus cards sucked (except for James).
So, with a tacit agreement to change the way bonus cards were used next time (there are a few variants already on BGG to this effect) we all came away enjoying the game. It took us maybe 1:15 to play and would be less once we’re more familiar with the character cards. A lot of game squeezed into a short time, and one that I’m sure will come out again some week soon.
Final Scores
James 50 (or 36 without bonus cards.. who needs ‘em), Jon 22, Tonio 24 and Andy 29
Only one game played, but I like it and winning the first outing always helps.
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