Space Gate Odyssey

I know it's the same designer as Yggdrasil, but it doesn't look to share any of the same DNA. Ludonaute has put out some really interesting stuff as of late though. May be worth keeping an eye on.

So is this what I wanted Spacecorp to be?

Sagrilarus wrote: So is this what I wanted Spacecorp to be?

It’s got worker placement, so I’m going to assume no.

It is doing a lot of stuff I like though, I’m probably going to pick it up.

I’ve this twice now and I think it’s utterly fascinating.

Make no mistake, it’s Euro AF, but it bucks the current trend of recent Euros with a clean, focused scoring system and while it has little direct conflict, it’s VERY interactive. Given that the heart of the game is trying to lay out your own space station and trying to be efficient in how you do so and colonize planets, that came as a big surprise.

So while the tile placement is the main element here, the worker placement, which honestly has more in common with role selection than it does WP, is the heart of the game. There’s four “rooms,” each with its own action. Your turn essentially is picking a room, moving one of your engineers (workers) to that room, and getting a number of action points based on how many guys you’ve got in that room. The trick is that everyone else gets action points for the guys they’ve got in the room as well. So much of the game can be holding off on something you really need in hopes that your opponents do it for you on their turn.

The area control bit is pretty neat, too. They managed to fit a lot of variety in different twists on conditions and scoring without a lot of overhead. It’s pretty smart stuff. The race to colonize is fucking intense, too.

It’s definitely not going to be for everyone, but we’re loving it in our house. “Genre X with genre Y with a bit of genre Z” is a big thing these days, not always executed to great effect, but I think this game nailed it. The play is complex, not the rules. I absolutely suck at it, but I found myself waking up this morning and thinking about things a I could do differently.