Black Angel

EvEvanstar5,9

At the start of the game players roll three dice, one each of the three colors of actions, and place them into their personal dice area in the ship board. Then going in turn order, each player may either select a die, and resolve the effect of a space that matches the color, a number of times equal to the pips on the die, with the dice ranging from 0-3 pips. Each of the three colors as one primary action, and one 'do things on the space map action'. For the primary actions, grey and green actions remove the two forms of damage the ship board takes on when players take space map actions. yellow dice build out your personal board of tiles. The personal board of tiles is a 3x3 grid for the tiles. New tiles slot in from the left or bottom, and if they meet another tile they push it along the chain, eventually possibly pushing tiles out of the grid entirely. The tiles come in two varieties, some are endgame scoring, some are special abilities that can be activated at the start of your turn, or when you put a damage cube on them after having taken a repair action. The most crucial thing about these tiles is that they provide you with a reliable way of getting the various resources in the game. More robots, or moving robots means you can get more dice. More spaceship tokens or moving space ship tokens means you can benefit more from the cards in your hand when you take space board actions. Then of course important luck mitigation resource production. Interestingly, the end game victory point tiles want to be pushed out, as when they sit on your grid they have a maximum scoring threshold of 4vp, but this gets increased when they get ejected. Die selection can be tricky, as you can take a die rolled by one of your opponents by paying them a crystal token. The value of the die you take can also be increased by 2 (to a maximum of 3 pips) if it's your own die being used. When you take a space action, you send out a cute little spaceship with one of your robots out into the hex board. If you end your movement on a planet matching the color of the die you used to take the action with, you can place a card from your hand that also matches the color of the space. The cards come in two varieties. Some give you a special bonus when they fall off the board as the main ship moves, others give you a new action opportunity to take with dice of the matching color. Once a player no longer can or wants to take actions, they instead reset. They discard any remaining dice, losing a point for each pip remaining, then clear the cards from the side of their board, bank the damage cubes they collected to get the extra tile activations with, then they gather the dice they deserve, roll them and place them into their area. They are allowed to lock a single die at this point, preventing that one die from being purchased by other players, by spending a crystal. Then the ship moves one tile forward, the rearmost tile falls off the world, maybe giving cool things to players sitting on the cards on that tile, then the tile is flipped and added to the front of the space map. Generally, resetting is rough. When you reset you don't get to do anything on your turn, and if you are the first player to reset, other players will often buy your dice out from under you by the time your turn comes back around. Getting their crystals is nice, but they are easy enough to come by that accelerating your next reset feels a bit frustrating. Yellow dice are also in impossibly high demand. Getting new and better tiles is an easy way to get victory points, or a crucial way to improve your engine. There are also some substantial flip luck elements in terns of how the cards that get played into space. A player with a good set of cards in their starting hand, really has a substantial advantage in the entire game. In the advanced rules it says when you have the opportunity to draw, you can draw 2 choose 1 instead of just top-deck, and this helps, but even so, there are late game cards and early game cards all shuffled in. That being said, despite the relative chaos, I find this game thrilling. I like the way the map scrolls, I like trying to manage my player board smartly and failing, I like flying through space in my little ships, I like planning what dice I need and when, and I like how the repair actions on the ships are rewarded in interesting ways. It's a heavily player driven game, and has gone differently each time. ★ 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