Interstellar Spaceship Board Game Review

Do you think the games presented are too simple? Well, today we have a preview of the massive board game Interstellar Spaceship for you, where you will join others in a race against time that will really get you going. The following paragraphs will tell you what this part has to offer and how its expansions work.

• Number of players: 14
• Play time: 120 minutes
• Price: 2316 CZK (Tlama Games)
• Age: 13+

The Sun’s life cycle in Interstellar is coming to an end

Every star eventually turns into a red giant, which is really not a pleasant place to live. In the year 2357 in Spaceship Interstellar, even the Sun is slowly approaching this state, thanks to humanity itself. So it’s up to you to get out of its reach before the Earth is engulfed in flames and find a new home where you can actively participate with a multinational company of your choice.

As usual in board games, Interstellar is played in rounds, with three phases that follow each other precisely, so you can’t exactly play one at a time and another at different times. First comes the Action phase. During it, you are allowed to perform one of five game actions. More precisely, you can reach for any of the five tokens, and the last one offered will be a token that will allow you to skip your turn, but this is not necessarily a bad thing, because the sooner you finish the Action, the sooner you will move on to the rescue phase and, what’s worse, sometimes you will get an interesting reward.

In the action phase, you can choose to mine, which is a one-time step to get resources, but it speeds up the end somewhat and also creates a negative image for your corporation, which is probably even worse than causing the apocalypse. While the previous option is a one-time step, technology research is a step that can be repeated until you just want to. Once you have spent the required amount and deployed scientists, there is nothing stopping you from researching one of the technologies. You should invent them quite gradually, with one exception – life-saving technologies, which are limited by the fact that they can only be invented in limited quantities.

As unlimited as the basic idea of ​​exploration, working on the market and traveling between planets, the ships you control always cost a certain amount of fuel. You can play tokens built on repeat until you cover them with another token, which again can be unlimited or one-time, as in the case of Planetary Production. This action works like this: you can activate a planetary production token on Earth or on other worlds where you have bases. Whether you activate all the buildings on a given world is entirely up to you, which I personally really like because activation requires a lot of thought.

However, you also have to consider their consequences. Elemental mining can then be supported by a research ship, which will give you one more cube of materials than without it. There are also special tokens that you get by completing various goals, for which you can unlock parts with special actions. As mentioned above, once you complete this stage, the salvage stage comes, which is the core of this work. In the salvage stage, you do not actually use the planetary production token, but process the rest of the action tokens in reverse. Regardless of whether it is basic or special.

Again, there is nothing stopping you from skipping ahead and getting the resources you choose. But until you do, you work with the resources and then do one action after another. The first option is to make a mechanism for Interstellar, which you expand with certain cubes of raw materials. You add ready-made mechanisms to the module of the spaceship, trying to complete it. The second option is nothing more than sending your representative to the space of the world government, where the scientist of your choice will nest and bring you the benefits associated with the given box. If you do not apply for a position in the government, there is also “Saving the population”, within the framework of which you pay for raw materials of a certain color on the market and put the population in cryomodules, which also allows you to gain prestige.

The last option is to move the probe with the fuel located in a certain space, at the end of which is the trappist system. Once you have completed this stage, the government stage will come, which is largely the moment during which you will evaluate some decisive factors and, as a result, you will also know whether the end has already come or not, because in this phase the Sun automatically moves in a solar spiral, which can lead to the absorption of the Earth. This moment can represent one of the negative conclusions if you do not have time to complete at least two of the three goals set, after which you will have the final round and the subsequent scoring. If nothing like this happens, you prepare another bike and move on.

If you like add-ons, there are quite a few of them in the base. In the menu, you can find seven specific options that can shape the gameplay in a certain way. If you think that the studio behind this work has forgotten about single players, then I will please you, because this is definitely not the case. You can also find a single mode, the appearance of which is so tempting to try it out, and that’s not all, because here you can find three more expansions.

Kuiper Peril, Antimatter, and Halley’s Comet DLC Take Interstellar to the Next Level

From the previous paragraphs, you can tell that this thing is definitely not a slouch. However, it can still be enriched quite a bit. The very first expansion, Danger from Kuiper, plays with the idea of ​​asteroids that you can capture with your mobile fire platforms. You read that right, this expansion allows you to burn asteroids, the tokens of which play a vital role, especially in the solar phase and at the end of the government phase, during which you always “move” them. The fire platforms themselves then yield action tokens related to their activation. Overall, this expansion brings an interesting aspect that I found quite satisfying.

The second expansion that can be obtained is Anti Matter, which adds the element Moscovium to the game, which can be obtained by mining and synthesizing solar energy. In addition to this, there are also specialists working in the laboratory, where they work with the newly discovered novelty. What is interesting is that, although normal solar mining is problematic, when it comes to obtaining Moscovium, you do not lose reputation and do not move the scale of solar production. Even more interesting is the fact that by actively turning on this component, you change the orbits of the planets, which is a decent wilderness that also acts as a cube. Repeatedly moving a planet to a given point can easily lead to its subsequent destruction.

The latest expansion is Halley’s Comet. As the name suggests, Interstellar adds nothing more than Halley’s Comet, which causes quite a stir along the way. The comet can be mined, you can extract raw materials from it, and most importantly, you can move it, because this beauty will definitely not sit in the corner of the map. During its passage, you deal with the gravitational influence of the planets and, above all, with the development of the comet itself, which “rolls out” more and more raw materials. What I really like about it is how it moves, like the planets move.

The expansions to the Interstellar board game are quite extensive and do a good job of increasing the overall replayability. My personal favorite was Antimatter, along with Halley’s Comet. A bit of Kuiper Peril is also nice. Once a player has the base game, it’s worth exploring these parts as well, as each one is worth a real look.

Spaceship Interstellar is an outstanding strategy game.

There are a lot of board games, but let’s talk about only a few of them that are in the category of projects that you really want to have at home because they are something special. And it is to this narrow group that the board game “Spaceship Interstellar” belongs. In it, a person has the opportunity, like Ikaros, to experience the struggle with the golden disk, but he does not have to lose it, which is exciting. Of course, in many cases it will end in disaster, but in the end you will find that with the right distribution of your forces, you can save humanity.

The Spaceship Interstellar set is one of those carefully crafted strategies that are designed to keep fans of the genre engaged and engaged for hours. Plus, when you add variations and expansions to your play, there’s a good chance that this play will last you until the fall without being played. If you like this format, I’m probably not afraid to jump into this epic rescue of humanity. If you fire up the game, expect to find a corrected token in the box that corrects the creators’ misstep.

We would like to thank Czech distributor Blackfire for providing us with a copy of Interstellar Spaceship and three expansions.