Just because I don’t have time to create videos doesn’t mean I can’t throw my thoughts into the middle lane of the Interweb Superbahn and see what happens, eh?

If you ask me how many board games I have, up to a year ago I would have said “Not that many”. But in my current state of non-game-playing, it’s starting to feel a bit like “more than I’d like”. So I’m getting the urge to really dig in and make my game collection more potent. The first game up in my new collection re-examination is one that was sent to me by Clever Mojo Games called Alien Frontiers. I’m always wary of games from lesser known publishers and/or designers. You really have no idea what you’re going to get. But I’ll play anything once, and my wife and I are glad we did.

Game mechanic recaps in text form are always mind-numbingly boring, but I’ll do my best to give you an idea of the game using the power of your MIND. Close your eyes and see if you can pick up what I’m putting down.

So, you’ve got this alien planet that’s ripe for the colonizing. Surrounding the planet are a bunch of orbital facilities that do different things whenever a player uses them. Three of these orbital facilities involve creating and dropping colony pods onto the planet below, and the rest of them involve making it easier to create these pods in some way. You use these facilities by docking some combination of your ships at them, and in this game your ships are dice. I know – that’s not very aerodynamic. But the Borg do it… why can’t we?

Anyway, each player’s turn consists of them rolling their available ships (players start the game with three out of six total), and then deciding where to put them. For example, one spot will give you a half of any single ship’s die face worth of energy (rounded down) that you stick there. If you have two dice with the same number X on them, you can plug those two dice into the spot that converts X amount of energy into 1 ore each. Another spot lets you plug in two of the same dice along with one/two/three energy and one/two/three ore for your fourth/fifth/sixth die. Those extra dice can be used to open up your options on the board, or you can burn any of them that come up six (along with an energy and an ore) for a colony pod that you can drop on the planet.

Colony pods are important for a couple of reasons. You get one point for every pod you put on the planet as well as for every region in which you have more than your opponents. Control a region like this gives you access to that region’s bonus power. Each region’s bonus is linked to one of the orbital facilities, making it awesomer for you by lowering resource requirements or giving you more resources back when using them. The region int he middle of the board will sell you an extra ship that you can use as long as you don’t lose control of the region.

Scores in the game are updated in real time like Settlers of Catan, rather than a running tally. So at any given point during the game, you should be able to tally up your colony pods, controlled regions and a few other things to get your total. Whoever has the highest score around the time someone drops their final colony pod is the winner. Nice and simple.

My wife and I played this three or four times in a row this weekend, and we had ourselves quite a fun little time with it. The interaction with your neighbors is in the “you totally went where I wanted to go” vein, but fortunately there seems to be no shortage of useful things to do if you find your destination otherwise occupied. You might think that analysis paralysis would be an issue, but with only three dice to start and seven at maximum, there’s really only one or two decisions per turn to be made – and those are usually between only two or three places that are going to help you at all this round. But because the turns come so fast, though, this doesn’t feel limiting.

If Caylus sounds overwhleming and the theme of Pillars puts you off, then look into this one. With an easy to explain rule set and quick, non-agonizing decisions, I could easily recommend this to someone looking to branch out from Ticket To Ride, Settlers or Carcassonne. It’s no Die Macher, but it’s a nice lateral movement into the worker-placement zone that you can’t really go wrong giving a shot.

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