Space Alert
Designer: Vlaada Chvátil
Published by: Czech Games Edition
Players: 1-5
Space exploration. The theme of a crew boldly going to and fro across space is immediately familiar to most of us. It calls to mind visions of intrepid explorers and alien worlds, daring captains commanding sleek vessels in graceful combat among the stars. Spaceship crews can be the noble officers or the roguish pirates, masters of their tiny domains floating through the vastness of space.
Space Alert, however, is less a grand space opera than a wonderful space comic tragedy...
DATA TRANSFER IN 5.. 4.. 3.. 2.. 1..
You play the hapless crew of an aptly named 'Sitting Duck' class exploration ship. Working cooperatively with the other players, your goal is simply to survive the 10 minutes it takes for the ship's computer to scan the immediate area of space you've arrived in. Keep your ship more-or-less intact and your crew more-or-less un-devoured by horrors from the depths of space until the ship completes the scan and jumps to hyperspace and you win. How much trouble could you possibly get into in 10 minutes anyway?
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| Your ship, ready to begin the mission |
The game is split into two halves - the first, main part of the game is played in realtime. Over the course of a 10 minute audio track on the mission CD (or more likely generated via one of the handy mobile apps available, or read off printed mission cards if you're playing by torchlight in a blackout) the computer will announce events and encounters and the players will use their hand of action cards to plan what their character will be doing each turn, from moving around the ship to firing weapons and fighting enemy boarders. After the 10 minute track is finished, your actions planned and fingers crossed, the board is reset and the actions and events go through a turn-based resolution to see what really happened during the mission. Oh I know you think you fired that laser cannon, but did someone else suck all the power out of the reactor first? Were two of you trying to use the same lift between the upper and lower decks at the same time, causing both of you to be delayed? Is your entire painstakingly planned out series of actions now an exponentially growing chain of catastrophes? Oh yes, almost certainly.
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| Player board and action cards |
At the start of the game, each player receives a hand of action cards, which are split into two halves, one representing movement (left, right or up/down a deck) and one representing an action such as firing weapons or charging shields. Each action card can be played face down into a numbered turn space on your player board as either movement or action. Each player also receives one `Heroic` action which will apply a bonus to that action or allow you to move directly to a given sector of the ship in a single turn. The 10 minute mission is split into 3 separate phases of 3, 4 and 5 turns. When you enter a new phase, you pick up additional action cards, but your actions of the previous phase are now locked in, no backsies. When all 3 phases are done, you return the main board to the starting layout and move turn by turn through the resolution, placing and moving threats, executing player actions, and resolving damage step by step, and it's almost certain that you'll find that what you thought you'd planned isn't quite what went down. In the wild panic of the mission your math was off, or movements got delayed, or you just forgot something altogether and that killer meteor you thought was dealt with on turn 3 is actually streaking towards your ship and its blissfully unaware crew.
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| Threats advance down their respective trajectories |
The core of the action in Space Alert comes from the introduction of threats, which are announced by the audio track, stating the type of threat (common or serious), the turn the threat appears on the board, and where it is attacking - one of the three zones (red, white or blue) or inside the ship itself. Threats then begin to advance down a trajectory track each turn until destroyed or otherwise dealt with, triggering actions when they cross certain thresholds on the track (generally bad news for you). There are a large variety of threats drawn at random from decks which can also be customised for difficulty, and range from straightforward enemy ships that shoot at you as they advance down the threat trajectory to giant space squids, shield draining energy monsters and sneaky saboteurs, all with various abilities that will end up dealing damage to your ship if not dealt with in a timely fashion. If any one zone of the ship suffers 6 or more damage, it's game over.
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| A giant goddamn space monster. Serious threat indeed. |
So you have threats, and you have actions, and the challenge is working with your teammates to perform the right actions at the right time to deal with those threats before they inevitably bring your frail ship down around your ears in a shower of hull plates and duct tape. It's never that easy of course, because you never have enough time. Or actions. And your crewmate forgot to move the mouse on the computer and the screen saver shut down the whole damn ship and everyone's delayed while your malfunctioning rockets are about to blow the right half of the ship clean off and OH GOD.
Communication is the key skill here, at least until the communication system goes down again (No talking until it comes back online!), but the puzzles the game presents are complicated and engaging enough even for a competent space team that the game doesn't become trivially solvable once your group has the game mechanics worked out. The time pressure and demands placed on every player also largely negates the risk of one experienced player dictating the best plays for the whole team. You'll have your hands full enough playing your own turns and effectively communicating your intentions to the rest of the team, there won't be time to play the other players moves for them.
The game has a tendency to skew more complex as it progresses rather than less. Every action carries a significant opportunity cost, not just in terms of resources (cards, energy and turns) spent to take that action, but in the impact it will have on your gameplan in future turns. Move to the bottom left of the ship to pick up those battlebots and you're now three turns (and cards) away from being able to man the upper blue zone guns. Wasn't someone else looking after that? I went to jiggle the mouse I thought YOU were! Sure you can charge the shields to weather the attack of the monstrously large incoming enemy cruiser, but that reactor also powers the guns and now it's empty. And to recharge it someone will need to go down there and spend an action on it, and of course if the main reactor is empty someone needs to go there and refill it from a finite supply of fuel rods first.
The threats provide immediate tactical challenges, but the decisions you take will necessarily impact your broader strategy, when it can take a quarter of the game to get from one corner of the ship to the other, you'll need to have in mind from the start what areas you're going to be able to cover effectively, and communicate that to your teammates so you aren't blindsided by a killer threat emerging later that nobody is equipped to respond to. There is no plodding through the first turns or a slow buildup in Space Alert, it's right into the action from the first turn until the last.
Time management is critical, both in the realtime section and during resolution, when player actions are executed one by one in turn order. If you're planning to both charge an empty reactor and fire a weapon on turn 5, you better make sure the player doing the shooting is acting after the player refilling the power in turn order. Simply mistiming your actions is bad enough, worse is when you get 'delayed' (from an unchecked computer, bumping into someone on a lift on the same turn, or some other nasty occurrence) and you do nothing that turn and all your subsequent actions get pushed back one turn. Your carefully coordinated plans to fire two weapons simultaneously to overwhelm an enemy's shields, recharge your red reactor and be back at the bridge in time to make the all important computer check are now in ruins, leaving you with an undamaged threat, an empty reactor and even more delays.
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| The resolution board. Place threats, player actions, resolve damage, threats advance. |
However, this cascading chaos never feels unfair or arbitrary, it's actually a ton of fun and conveys the frantic theme perfectly. You'll facepalm when you realise you've taken an action to fire the cannons a turn before that threat appeared, or just tried to charge a reactor when the main supply is empty, but you will never be angry at the game, because it was your own stupid fault, stupid! The board is set up with all the bits to let you track your characters and the results of their actions but things will always, always get missed in the frenzy of the realtime mission. The capability is there to track everything, and you have all the information when you make your decisions, but the pace and dynamics of a group working together against a tight clock will inevitably lead to human error. Hilarious human error.
You will laugh and commiserate together over the heroic and comical struggles of your doomed crew, and it makes those times you do pull out the win that much more satisfying. You will rarely if ever 'get on top' of the situation and you will rarely be able to eliminate every threat, rather you will be making agonizing decisions over what can be mitigated enough or ignored for the moment and what you absolutely must deal with right now, and of course, you don't have long to decide. It drives home the concept that you aren't trying to beat the enemy, you're just trying to survive, and when you limp into hyperspace 1 damage away from death, space squid shaking its tentacles at you in impotent fury, it will feel like a genuine, hard fought and well deserved victory.
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| Damage reduces the effectiveness of your systems. Zone blue is not looking too hot right now. |
Space Alert is recommended for 1-5 players, but 4 or 5 is the sweet spot. You can play it solo but it definitely loses a lot without the communication aspect, an interesting puzzle but not much more. 2 or 3 is workable with dummy players ('androids') being added to bring the player count to 4 and additional action cards being dealt out to the human players to command the extra pawns. Again, the game is as much about the interpersonal interactions as it is solving the puzzle of the game itself and it's a lesser game when those aspects are reduced, but 2 or 3 players can definitely have a good time with it. The game is clearly designed around 4 players, with 5 adding additional threats ('unconfirmed reports' in the audio track) that are dealt out only if there are 5 players.
In terms of production values, Space Alert is top notch. The board, cards and pieces are of good quality and clearly communicate all the necessary information. Bright colours, nice artwork and in the latest edition, absolutely delicious looking plastic cubes taking the place of the traditional wooden pieces. The rulebooks are easy to understand, thematic and comprehensive but suffer somewhat from being organized into a rulebook and a mission handbook, which introduces the game rules piecemeal over several training scenarios. Good if you have a group willing to put in the time for multiple games before you even get to play once 'for real', but harder for one person learning the game enough to teach it to others or a group that just wants to get stuck in to the full experience right away, and it can complicate things when you're trying to look up a given rule or situation. But once you've got a handle on the game as a whole, the tight design and visually accessible cards and board mean you likely won't need to refer to back the rulebook except for odd edge cases of certain threats, which are collected nicely in an FAQ style list on the back page.
I'd recommend Space Alert wholeheartedly to most groups with a few caveats, if you're already into "gamer's games" I'd say dive right in. You'll want to make sure your fellow players are up for a little intensity, there isn't any player conflict or really any potential for grudges and people getting angry, but for ten straight minutes you'll all be running hot, any mission that doesn't end with a collective sigh of relief at the end of the track was too easy! Also be a bit more hesitant if you're likely to play with people who don't have much experience with boardgaming as a hobby - although the mechanics and theme are on the whole pretty simple in execution, I wouldn't class Space Alert as an entry-level game simply because it's so very front-loaded. There is little opportunity to learn-as-you-play here, at least one person needs to know the rules pretty comprehensively before the first play, and the other players need to know almost as much. That takes time, not because it's hugely complex per se but just because you need to know nearly everything that happens over the course of the game right at the beginning in order to play effectively and you can't really take time out during the mission to explain things. Even in writing this review I had to edit out big chunks of text where I was explaining rules in depth because it was just too much to explain every system, but there was still a lot it's necessary to communicate to give an effective view of the game as a whole.
The handbook training missions are a great way to progressively introduce more rules into the game but as mentioned you need to have a group who is willing to put the time in and play several games one after another before they're even really playing the game, which might not describe your group of friends just looking for a game to pick up and play together. That's not to say that you can't introduce it to your non gamer friends and have a great time with it, but if you already know your group won't have the patience for it don't buy something that's going to sit on the shelf and never get to the table.
If you can put the effort in however, you'll find a greatly rewarding experience that's fun both to play and share with others, it is with good reason that Space Alert is considered a king among co-op games. And with the ability to tailor your threat decks and difficulty to your group and create a new random and exciting mission every time, there's nearly endless variety here that will keep you coming back for more, redshirts on your first mission to grizzled space veterans alike.
See you all on the final frontier.
Posted with Blogsy
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