Trying to continue from the 2018 thread. My copy of SpaceCorps arrived last night. My 8 y/o son and I set it up and played through the Mariners era. What I was surprised by was how not heavy the game is. It’s your standard deck builder, but without a deck. It’s Mage Knight with the Unit market, but without the Advanced Action and Spell offers. It’s Ticket to Ride with numbers. We had fun though, and the play through the Mariners age was pretty slick. We’ll see how much more involved stuff gets with Planeteers and Starfarers. I know things now that I would do differently in Mariners.
I found the game pretty theme light. The cards are just actions with numbers. At least for the Mariners era, you could easily re-theme it to a train game–establishing depots and stations or whatever–without changing a single rule. There’s no sense of the time/fuel trade-off that movement has in High Frontier or Leaving Earth: rockets cobbled together from whatever you can find, racing not just against your opponents, but against the frontier of human knowledge and technology, gravity slingshots, aerobrakes, solar powered ion drives. Maybe it gets more thematic at the eras progress though. We’ve set up to continue our game this evening.