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Publisher's Description:The Planetary Union of the Andromeda galaxy wants wealthy traders from Earth to invest in their economy. To control such investments, they have allocated three orbiting economic centers above each of their most important planets for development by Earth interests. This keeps the humans off their planets and also creates competition among the traders interested in such development. The Planetary Union hopes this competition will bring them even more money for these investments. To keep the humans from conspiring amongst themselves to divide up the economic centers with secret agreements, the Planetary Union requires that all trades be done under their watchful eyes. |
Box info:
Trev says:I wasn't sure what to make of this game at first. I was interested enough to buy a copy after playing once, but it took a couple more games before I knew I liked it. |
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The main point of the game is to get your coloured cubes onto the satellites around the planets on the board - so earning victory points. First you must move your cubes from Earth to a planet and then from a planet to one of its satellites. Each player begins each round with nine cards, each showing one of the planets on the board. You get to move cubes by playing between three and seven cards showing the same planet - for which you get to move half as many (rounded down) cubes from Earth to that planet or can make that many attempts to move a cube from the planet to its most valuable remaining satellite. I say "attempt" because you don't automatically get to put your cube onto the satellite - instead you get to use the "ashtray" (known in the rules as the "planet ring"). The ashtray is a short plastic 'cup' with a small hole in the side. You place this over the cubes on a planet, give them a shake up, turn the hole away from you and pull the ashtray towards yourself until the requisite number of cubes have emerged. Any of your opponents' cubes get sent back to Earth and the first of your own that appears (if any) gets placed onto a satellite. So you can never be sure of getting one of your cubes onto a satellite, although you can improve your chances by sending more of yours out to the planet and/or your opponents' back to Earth. Before each round of actions there is also a round of trading. The start player places a card face-up and everyone else simultaneously places a card to offer in exchange - this must be different to that offered by the start player. The start player then repeats the process once or twice so that everyone has two or three cards in front of them. The start players chooses one of those to swap with and then other players, depending on their seating position and whether anyone has traded with them, get to trade with each other with the cards that are left. As well as playing sets of cards to move cubes, you can also use them to gain larger hand sizes (up to 13) or various other adavantages such as being able to trade up to four cards. There are also wild-cards that are given to players when they play sets of four to seven cards (without wild-cards). Unused wild-cards can be saved for victory points at game end, but as they contribute to hand size, not many are kept until right near the end. The card draw and the ashtray mean that chance can play havoc with your gameplan and you have some games where you seem totally unable to gain a satellite. The upside is that you have some games where you can't do wrong. And it is also worth bearing in mind that you can catch up quite easily if things start going your way. Nonetheless, if your prefer your games cerebral and dry, you should avoid this one. I like quick-flowing light games, though, so I'm perfectly at home with it. The only other points to note are that the game time varies hugely with the number of players - very quick with three and much longer with five. Secondly, we tended to find that players were reluctant to use cards to move cubes to planets rather than use the ashtray. Consequently, we have already formulated and play with the following variant: VARIANT: When a player plays a set of cards that allows them to move more than one cube, they can split that between moving cubes from Earth and attempts on the ashtray. Players must declare what they are going to do before they start either action. To buy: |
