OMG you’re reviewing games before you’ve played them! ;)
Bahaha! Nicely done :)
Come on man, this is a Butterfield design! Its an EVENT!
I have good reason from previous work to presume its excellent from a brief reading of the rules. We shall see if he makes a liar of me :)
Well that was an enjoyable Friday evening.
Solo game using the solo rules provided.
Era start
I am yellow. The Competition is represented by Blue, Green & Purple all using Blue bases.
The smaller board to the right is the score counting board + contract. Note the Yellow (me) & Blue (Competition) Profit tokens at the start of the track. This is the games Score as well as being a resource.
Era end
I leap frogged my way from the moon, to establishing a base on Halley’s Comet then leapfrogged to Phobos where a factory was established to help build on Mars.
The Competition landed on Northern Mars and discovered primitive bacteria. we took Southern Mars and discovered water. Note I ended up 1 Profit being the Competition.
As a last gasp I launch a team into the Beyond to the Asteroid belt and snag the 1st Beyond marker.
Era 2 begins
Well this escalated quickly. The complexity of the game has taken another big step up. My infrastructure (lower right) is relatively weak. But my 1st Beyond expedition gave me a team on Ceres which has Water. Note the interim production extended the Competitions lead over me to 2T.
Early thoughts after Era 1
I am really having a great time. Its always a nice feeling when you are in the hands of a master game designer. In this case with Chad Jenson developing and Butterfield designing you have two.
I have zero complaints mechanically, although I suspect there maybe a dominant strategy for the first Era, we shall see.
I have a few minor negatives. Mainly around graphic design.
The game is a little cold for me. While there is some theme I feel like the cards were wasted. Instead of a bunch of repeated stock images we could have had little theme text boxes and unique images even for duplicate effects.
Some of the colour choices are a little off. I am not colour blind but the purple, team gets lost on the map and the less said about using black cubes in a space game the better.
Worst the rule book commits the sin of having a watermarked image behind the text (as you can see in the lower left above). They grey sometimes get so dark in the background picking out the black text becomes a chore.
Speaking of the rulebook its laid out fairly procedurally. Which makes learning the game easier (you dont need to know everything to play Era 1 just setup and learn the rules while playing). Thats good. very good. Whats bad is the lack of index, so you end upo flipping through that book a lot hunting down where you say such and such rule although the reference cards are good.
I think the most pleasant surprise is how smoothly such a heavy game plays. The Solo rules seem to make things play quicker which is a rare and most welcome.
It has this nice feeling of being a substantial game. Each move is meaningful and weighty. Turns are in years or decades and it feels right for what its trying to cover which is a lot. The analysis paralysis level is spot on for me. Not too much, but enough that I enjoy planning.
If you think the mariner-to-planeteer era is a jump in complexity, wait till you get to the starfarer era. All that elegance and consistency falls apart in the third era. At least the presentation doesn’t bear up as well, with all the rules for colony points and the various colony types.
I understand what SpaceCorp is trying to do at this point, ramping up the scale in terms of human actions and celestial distances, but I don’t think it presents it very well. I need to make new player aids and work out a better way to teach it, because what had been a really cool streamlined space race turned into a mathy quagmire and a tedious conclusion to a four-hour game. :(
Seems to me the safeguard against a dominant strategy is the randomness of the explorer tiles, card offers, and card draws. But if you’re just playing against the bot, you’re probably right there’s an easy way to beat it, especially in the first era. But wait until you get to the starfarer era. The bot just takes off at that point, scattering colonies willy nilly and getting huge point dumps each time.
I really don’t care for the solitaire play. :( The bot is just a dumb set of random placements that bypass the actual game rules. It’s nothing more than an artificial way to push up the score marker and grab some of the spaces away from you, without rhyme or reason. SpaceCorp once again demonstrates that good solitaire games are designed as solitaire games, and not multiplayer games with a dumb “AI” based on card draws.
Also, playing against the bot sacrifices one of the main cool things about SpaceCorp: how you use each other’s bases and infrastructure. That’s a unique element of the design, and the solo play has no way to implement it, so it just omits those rules.
I like SpaceCorp after two solo games and one three-player game, but I think a) the third era is problematic and b) it’s not a viable solitaire game.
-Tom
Thanks Tom! Interesting point about the solo rules missing elements. I may try a solo multiplayer game after this.
Also thanks for the heads up on the mathy last Era. I suspect I maybe begging you for help at some point understanding it :)
That’s not a thing!
I would recommend writing yourself a note listing, in your own words, the eight ways to earn colony points. Constantly having to read the chunk of text in the corner of the board isn’t so helpful. You might also do with same with the colonies on offer, because a lot of those spaces on the board will be left empty based on player count. That means a lot of the information in that word soup is superfluous. If there’s one place the game really needed more theming, it’s the colonies.
-Tom
Top tips, thanks! Will do!
This better be a viable solo game…thats the only reason I bought it!
We’ll see on Wednesday!
I suppose viable is the wrong word. It’s certainly viable in that you can play it solitaire. But like so many games built for multiplayer with a solitaire bot thrown in for added value, the solitaire mode sacrifices too much of what’s interesting about the design. Having tried it, the solitaire mode is something I don’t care to play again.
-Tom
About Spacecorp, my first playthrough get’s the aster-ix. I think Tom mentioned a rule baout almost never playing a game 100% correct but I got a doozy wrong. We let movement go from site to site and did not include a base at some of those movements. It made exploration a lot more wonky then it should have been.
My other impression about it is that Starfarers is definitely it’s own beast. Mariners is essentially a Prelude for Planeteers, you get some infrastructure achieve some small goals and try to have a base to carry into Planeteers. But Starfarers has many more considerations than Planeteers. I suspect I’ll get the hang of of the colonization numbers quickly enough and be able to judge start systems better and quicker for colonial viability but that was an interesting math framework to suddenly toss in there as we crossed that line. Starfarers was also the longest of the eras for us. My advice is to check the contracts carefully to see what to build towards, really that’s good advice in any era. I hope to play again soon and very much enjoyed the game we did play. Like Rod we talked about card art. For a game that is on the harder side of sci fi the art was a little tacky. It’s a hard thing to nail but were not big fans. I did like the board layout and I’m glad my concern of it simply being the same game on three different boards pretty much evaporated by the end.
You and me both. That’s definitely not an issue SpaceCorp suffers!
-Tom
Received my Kickstarter copies of Evil High Priest and Dice Throne seasons 1 and 2. The latter is especially a really classy production with incredibly solid storage solutions, etc. Evil High Priest…well, they thought about their insert, clearly, and it very nicely accomodates the base game…and only the base game. Which feels like a bit of an oversight when they simultaneously funded the two expansions as part of the Kickstarter and indeed printed the rules for those expansions in the base game rulebook.
What? How do they play, you wonder? Good question. Maybe I’ll get to play them soon! But not yet.
Interesting! Thanks for the impressions. Yeah I am very much enjoying the ride here but even more interested in playing again to feel the measure and tempo of it a little better.
You note the length and difference in Starfarers, the pacing in this game, particularly on the mechanics side is noteable.
I like the way he plays with elegant little spinning mechanics like Shielding and allows you to pop them pleasantly.
Dice Throne just showed up on my radar and seems like a good fit for my collection - I’d love to hear some impressions.
Yeah, I’ll be pretty disappointed when my copy gets here if the solo mode sucks. That said, I think i can convince my son to play it with me if so.
Dont worry it is. Its different than the regular multiplayer rules but certainly viable and I had fun. The multiplayer rules played solo may be better, thats what I am going to try next.
The solo bot though abstracts all of the opposing players, so it feels like a force rather than something you can outwit or maneuver around.
It maybe a bit easy, or prone to chance as I just won my first game handily. Possibly I also got some rules wrong.
I like it. I think I will like it more after my second play with the other rules. I went into this blind so I didnt really know what KIND of game it was. I still dont in some ways. The multiplayer rules will add a lot to my understanding I think.
Its a very tight race game that surprised me. But is also a tableau engine builder with map elements plus an exploration game, with various little mechanics here linking or adding on. The fact that it plays fast is a huge plus. I just wish the scenery on this enjoyable ride was more thematic, varied & chromey.
Dont get me wrong I came away with a story from the game, which is what I wanted. But I also felt the game could help more with providing seeds for such stories.
Its got a unique scope which makes it interesting in and of itself.
Yeah so this isn’t a terrible game.
Summary, everyone gets to play a Disney Villain, up to 6 of you, and you each have a different objective to win. Because your fellow neighbors are also villains, they’re more than happy to slow you down and make sure the heroes and the allies get in your way.
What’s kind of interesting about this game is everyone is kind of playing a different game because the villains play very differently. Now sure the turns are/play the same, move here do the actions available here, but like Ursula doesn’t actually use her allies to defeat the heroes like the others do, she has contracts (I think that’s what they’re called). I played Maleficent and she’s all about getting her curses down which can be quite difficult to do since a couple of them are undone if she even moves to the location they’re at. Jafar seemed to have a lot of cards especially designed for the frequent harassment of his fellow villains but a freaking story about what he needed to do himself to win, and Captain Hook spent most his time trying to open a location to beat Peter Pan who showed up in the middle of the game. Meanwhile the Queen of Hearts just croquette her way to victory. Little John was doing… something.
I think the board geek crowd might try to pass this over because it’s licensed and is Disney of all things. It’s actually fun to play, the art is great, I mean really nice art and the figures, for plastic, wow. It’s simplistic as what you do per round but the complication is in the cards and those objectives, and they kept themes and characters to each villain (Peter Pan is only in Hook’s deck.).
Components look really good, but I feel like I might have to sleeve the cards. The art is really great but I could see rubbing card issues after only the first play through.
Now we played 6 players and that might be just 2 too many mostly because it’s really hard to keep track of what everyone is doing. With four you can probably see everything whereas I, and others, had trouble keeping track of those across the table.
Don’t overlook this one simply due to the Disney label. They have a lot of crappy or party game games out there, but this can stand by itself.
Perhaps I missed it, but I’m late to this thread and a search didn’t find anything conclusive…
Can someone recommend some 2-player card and/or board games? I’m all eyes/ears for everything, but bonus points for co-op (it will be easier to convince my wife if they’re cooperative.)
Thanks in advance!
Ooh, this sounds interesting, I love the villain angle but would’ve overlooked it due to the Disney label. Thanks for the heads up!
Yeah the box is beautiful, and you can find the game pretty much everywhere. I’ve looked at it several times, which my friends know, so they bought it for me. Everyone kind of left afraid to take on Jafar, but I’m convinced a few playthroughs will alleviate that fear. It’s greatest strength and weakness is probably going to be the same thing… the villains play very differently, so if you wind up with one no one wants to play that’s trouble. Not that I am some expert, but I’ll happily volunteer to try him next time. I’m convinced if Jafar hadn’t entered an hour long war with Captain Hook, he might have gotten further.