A real blast from the past, this game has not seen the light of day for 2 decades and yet I was able to remember many of the rules, needing only to scan them to get playing. I did not select this game to play and he who did was not convinced what we opened the box. It looks very much a product of its time, a large board, lots of plastic figures and Styrofoam storage trays. It looked an awful lot like A&A! Happily it does not play like A&A. The really big thing about this game is the solar system map that dominates the centre of the board.
Every turn you must advance the planets and asteroids on their respective tracks. Each planet moves on its own track at its own pace. As a result planets will become closer or farther away from each other each turn, thus impacting on ones strategy for conquering the solar system.
As we were only two players (as usual) we each started with three leaders, three times the starting territory cards and three time the starting pieces (in each of 3 colours apiece) Like risk, we started by claiming our territories and then placed our forces (3 figures at a time) in our territories. We were restricted to not mix up our three different coloured forces in the same territory, which did present a challenge and made us cautious about how we deployed. The previous pictures gives you a good overall look at our deployment.
 |
| Green & brown vs blue & purple |
Venus and the Earth were the most contentious locations, with Mercury, Mars and the Moon being settled pretty quickly. While Earth was controlled around turn 4, as was Venus, Venus promised to be a battleground planet for the rest of the game.
Only one player had any asteroids at the start of the game and he had expanded that out to three asteroids, and threatened more.
We had fun playing this game, but there are some odd bits to the rules. But we were both very impressed by solar system track it elevated this game in a big way, well beyond the banality of the standard A&A game.
No comments:
Post a Comment