Master of the Galaxy

EvEvanstar2,5

In this game, players start with a home planet, a card representing your species with some abilities on it, and a bag with five cubes of each color. On our turn, you draw and place 3 cubes. Cubes can be placed on cards to activate the ability on the card when all the cube spaces are full, on planets once per game to get more cubes or along routes between planets so that you can build in new areas. The goal of the game is to be the first to place all your bases or by being the one to max out one of the tracks by collecting symbols that appear on the map or on cards. The flow of the game is very odd. Placing three cubes per turn means that the start of the game you have a number of turns where players are just slowly inching towards their first real action, as most actions take more than three cubes to complete and even then you have to get the right mix of colors. Of the various colors of cubes in the game, black cubes are for the most part are used to undo one of your own projects if for some reason you wanted to remove several turns of progress to get your cubes back. You have just as many black cubes as other cubes at the start of the game, so it's not uncommon for some of your three cube placements opportunities to be wasted. There's no discard pile for cubes, so cubes you draw and can't place go back in the bag to potentially be drawn and wasted again on the next turn. The game also has an instant win for the first player to meet one of the goals. As you play the game you get to take on additional cards for extra abilities. Many of these cards you just load up with cubes, then they provide you with what they do, and you don't need to mess with them, however many of these cards also have cube spaces marked with black stars which is the indicator that if you were to flush the card with a black cube, the cubes in spaces with black stars would be lost to the supply. I'm again not sure why this is the case. I would imagine that deciding to undo several turns of work would be it's own punishment. Returning to this idea that cards only provide their abilities when loaded with cubes, there is an entire deck of cards with cube stealing abilities. The way these work, is you load the stealer up with cubes, then activate it to remove a cube of a specific color from an opponent's card, thereby turning it off and making it harder for them to reactivate it. I don't understand why this mechanism is fun or a good idea. Players are somewhat limited in terms of what cubes they can get. This gets worse with another type of card that can be gotten which are combat cards. You play a combat card against an enemy system, and then both players have opportunities on their turns to add cubes to their own side of the card. As the player of the card, you can cherry pick which side you think your opponent can least handle based on what cubes you've been stealing from them and what planet colors they have. While the conflict is sitting out, it's worth it's printed symbol for the player who has the most cubes on it. When it finishes it punishes the loser of the conflict by stealing their cubes, cards, or even the entire system. Worse yet, the winner of the conflict gets the card back in their hand to play again. I don't understand this mechanism either, and again we have a situation where players are bumping up and down on the track as the card gets played, removed, then played again. Throughout I felt like I wasn't really connecting to the how and why of the game, but I wanted to. The parts of the game I liked were the way you build your bag, and how you manage your colors with which cubes sit on the board and which cycle back around. I liked the different card abilities outside of the stealing cards. ☆ Art, Iconography and components functional ☆ Clever or interesting mechanisms ★ Reasonably low downtime between turns with mildly AP players ★ Multiple plays stay interesting ★ Low or mitigatable luck elements ☆☆☆☆☆ Raw enjoyment

MeMestremutenstar3,0

Rating: 2/5 Production value: 1/4 Is the game in my collection/Love to have?: 0/1