27th Mar 2025 - Space Traders
by Robin. Sat 29 Mar (Updated at Sat 29 Mar)It's been a while now since the West Herts Playtest UK group disbanded, and I had not realised how much I missed it until I got to do a playtest at the club this week. Coming to us all the way from Milton Malsor, which I learnt is somewhere south of Northampton, was John with his prototype game Space Traders.
When I write these reviews, I'm by no means always nice. If you read my notes on Speakeasy, you'll recall that even the great Vital isn't safe from my constructive feedback. But I really enjoyed Space Traders.
John's cause was perhaps helped by setting my expectations low: it was, we were told, "complexity-wise ... similar to something like Splendor". This was true, though in most other respects it was not similar to Splendor. It had a bunch of things that I always like about a board game... modular board, wrap-around board, lots of incentive to screw other players over; and driven by a set of cards that are all nominally as good as each other, but which suddenly become really good or really useless depending on what you've got on the board.
There are a set of 16 (modular) board tiles that represent star systems (or constellations, or possibly moons in the Solar System, based on their names). You're aiming to supply them with resources - which means putting your counters on them. You get points at the end for counters on systems, plus accumulators for majorities and complete "control" of systems, and other things like that. But your counters can be displaced by other players also "trading" there after you. Once a system is fully supplied with resources, it starts manufacturing goods, which you can then pick up and deliver to other systems for more points.
You have a hand of 5 cards that you use to move, each of which specifies a direction, a distance and a type of resource to trade when you get there. So on any turn, you can normally get to about 4 of the 16 tiles, and trade something. But, like a good Eurogame, you can't score big on all the different scoring mechanics: you have to focus on a few of them. And once you start doing that, you really care about what's on those cards!
John said he was unsure about whether to pitch this game as a family game or a "gateway game". It was certainly a gateway game in terms of that tactical challenge, though I discovered you could also succeed by just bumbling around cluelessly. Not having fully understood the rules, I just went where my cards took me in the first game without any particular aim, and I did win - though as Paul kindly pointed out, this was probably a fluke. We played it a second time, and the second time I tried to focus on selected accumulators - and I came joint-last (with Paul 🙂). So you can definitely do it as a family game too, in that the aimless bumbling method works at least as well as the considered strategies.
After the first playthrough, I felt there was plenty more mileage to be had from this game, even without the set of added-chaos expansion tiles that John had also included. Of course, once I knew there was an added-chaos option, we had to use that. John recommended we only include one expansion tile in a game, and I chose the one I thought sounded most chaotic (moving the tiles around if you land on it). And it added just the right level of chaos: the underlying course of the game was broadly preserved, but with intermittent injections of randomness that each tended to benefit someone and annoy someone else. If the other expansion tiles are anything like that one, there's loads of scope for replayability.
Each playthrough was about 45 minutes. If it had been longer, it would have started to feel a bit procedural; but as it was, I was completely engaged in the arc of the game, building to its crescendo as the cards ran out. At a Thursday at the club, this would be a filler - but one of the more considered fillers like Ra. And we'd definitely play it more than Splendor.
So I would definitely play this again - and I hope John can be persuaded to bring it again. Paul did his part, in that John has now been press-ganged into signing up for membership. And above all it was fun to do playtesting like this: a mix of playing the game and trying to break it. We failed to break it, but we did all chuck in some ideas for what might improve it - which always makes you feel like you've made an impression, even if none of our ideas actually gets used. So I'd recommend this all round: playtesting in general, and playing Space Traders in particular.
All these low-downtime games... once again we got to the end of the evening and I hadn't looked around the other tables. Sorry. I'll make sure I write about what everyone else was playing next time, I promise.