Explorers, READY?!? You’re a Commodore of the Great Beyond in this game by Alderac Entertainment, a dice/card drafting game where players command a small fleet of ships that begin docked in their stations and then are deployed to sectors as new ships are acquired and assigned to help you gain credits, income, and ultimately, victory points.
Each player receives a command console, a set of 12 starting ships, and scoring cubes.
On a player’s turn, he rolls two die and uses the dice individually or the sum of the numbers to determine which sector he deploys or gains rewards/actions from.
The active player gets the rewards in the blue rectangles in the sector(s) on the command console while the passive players get the rewards from the red rectangles from deployed ships (cards placed behind the command console) for the appropriate sector(s).
Gaining rewards can happen every turn depending on the roll of the dice and is the way players increase their credits, income, and victory points. Credits are used to purchase new ships, which are then placed on the command console and the card that is being displaced gets deployed (turned upside down and slid underneath the command console to show only the red segment).
Credits can also purchase Colony Cards (yellow with blue spaceships), which are expensive but give players lots of victory points. The catch is that once a Colony is established in a sector, that sector is no longer under that player’s control, meaning it can’t be deployed and replaced with any other card.
The game ends when the first player gets to 40 victory points, but there are actions on some of the ship cards which allow active players to take victory points or resources from other players, etc. so it’s not always a straight forward, sportsmanlike race to the finish!
This game definitely has Gameschool applications, even though it doesn’t have any really obvious academic elements. The reading on the cards is not easy and understanding and using actions requires some very analytical thinking. This is a great game for exercising analytical reasoning skills, strategy, logic, and all that good math brainy stuff!
It’s also a great jumping off point for learning about actual space exploration, rockets and other space vehicles, the nature of space itself, military hierarchy, and so much more.
Space Base is a great choice for a space unit or just a fun family night or party game. It’s easy to learn/teach, progresses quickly, and is lots of fun! Thanks to Alderac Entertainment Group for sharing this game with us!
