Got my 5th full competitive play through of this game and I just can’t stop thinking about it. I was finally able to coerce my partner into learning it last night and she scored extremely well, actually tied with the other experienced player who’s done three games previously. The icons were quite the hurdle but by the final cycle she was comfortable playing her cards without issues and seeing her combo all her agendas was very impressive. I’m still in awe with how fun this game feels to play, how exciting getting a new tech is, or how scary it can be to have an opponent on your borders with some crazy missile tech. Will they abandon their agenda to take my sector in order to cause me to lose some agenda scoring? Or will they play it safe, and allow me to take the final turn of the game to attack them and rip their sector from their grasp? It’s a perfect game for me other than the setup time, but I actually enjoy game setups so as long as I have time it’s no problem. There is just enough exploring, combat against the game enemies, and tech building to give me real sense of a grand space opera. But, at its core it’s truly just a euro game where you are trying your hardest to print points from your agendas. After five plays, every icon makes perfect sense and the game is smooth and we can play a three player game in about 3 hours, and that’s with a new player. What a treat this game is! Has anyone else had the pleasure of diving into it? It’s quite the time investment but so worth it. I see this hitting the table way more often than Eclipse 2E or TI4 and I enjoy the euro stylings much more anyway. What a masterpiece!
When I mean euro in this case, I mean it is very much a resource management and point scoring game instead of just direct combat like TI4. It’s all about your agenda cards that score you points, and trying to set up your economy to satisfy those scoring objectives. At the end of each round there are big point scoring phases, compared to games like TI4 where you are just getting one point at a time from doing some objective. There also is a strong lack of randomness but the theme is well integrated. And the combat is deterministic so you don’t roll dice to fight, you know exactly how strong your ships are at all times which is refreshing.