Dice, the final frontier: Alien Frontiers review

Do you like euro-style worker placement games, but still crave the satisfying feeling of rolling a pile of chunky dice? Enjoy area control on a richly themed planetary battlefield? Keen on a kickstarted boardgame that doesn't totally suck? Alien Frontiers, a novel take on space-themed worked placement might be right up your orbit.


Alien Frontiers
Designer: Tory Niemann
Publisher: Game Salute
Players: 2-4

Alien Frontiers is a "dice placement" game - a variant on the worker placement genre where dice take the place of the traditional pawns or meeples representing your workers. The board is divided up into a series of orbital stations - the action spaces where your will place your dice - and the more static planetary territories below that represent the area-control struggle that is the overall victory condition. Players are aiming to amass the most victory points by building and deploying colonies to the planet, and controlling areas where your own colonies are most numerous. The game end is triggered when one player deploys their last colony, and the player with the most victory points from built colonies, controlled areas and alien tech card bonuses is declared the winner.

Each turn, the active player rolls their pool of available dice (referred to in-game as your ships or fleet) and then assigns them to action spaces. Each player assigns all of their ships before moving on to the next player, rather than alternating placements around the table. The values and combinations rolled determine which action spaces you are allowed to place into, each space representing one of 9 orbital stations that have different abilities and conditions for placement. The values of the dice placed also modify the effects of several stations, adding another consideration when deciding what ships to place where.

An empty planet ripe for space-colonialism

To place dice at a given orbital station, you need to roll a certain value or set (eg a pair of the same number). You will also be fighting with the other players as most stations have only a limited number of slots available, and dice remain on the board until the your next turn, allowing strategic placement to block your opponents out of vital actions. Certain core spaces like the colony constructor or solar generator are much easier to access in order to keep the game flowing and to always have viable options for placement. Others are more restricted - like the coveted shipyard (allows you to buy additional ships) which requires you to roll a pair and has one fewer spaces than there are players. Or the lunar mine where every die you place must be equal to or greater than the highest number already present in order to gather the limited ore resource.

The orbital stations are ultimately a means to advancing your overall goal of sending colonies down to the planet. Three of the 9 stations are various methods of getting a colony onto the planet, with the rest covering resource generation, expanding your fleet of dice, purchasing upgrades etc. The "baseline" action space is the colony constructor, which is always available as there is a separate track for each player. Up to 3 dice per turn can be placed here, each one advancing a colony down a construction track. When it reaches the end, the colony can be deployed at a cost of 1 energy and 1 ore. The other two colony-related stations allow you to sacrifice additional resources (3 relatively scarce ore in the case of colony constructor, and the permanent loss of a precious ship for the terraformer) to fast-deploy colonies in a single turn.

These territories provide bonuses to their controller, each zone is named after a sci-fi author

Getting a colony onto the planet is worth a victory point on its own, and you gain an additional point for every area you control outright, having the most colonies without a tie. Each area grants a bonus (relating to a specific orbital station) to its controller, and they are all well balanced enough that there will be serious consideration about where to place your colonies each time. No bonus is large enough to throw the game off balance by itself, but they are all genuinely useful and will enable different strategies by leveraging different orbital stations. You'll most likely settle your first couple of areas uncontested, but as the board rapidly fills up with more colonies than there are territories, it can become a wonderfully tense zero-sum affair. Every placement has the potential to break someone's control of an area, depriving them of a VP and a bonus they might be relying on. Conversely you can simply hole up in your own couple of territories, reinforcing them against the incursions of other players and defending your control bonuses and victory points. Relocation of colonies (your own, or your enemies) is possible through alien tech cards, but removal is not - the board can only get more full as the game progresses, and no matter what strategy you are pursuing it will be a tightly packed struggle for position by the end.

Alien tech cards give re-usable bonus abilities or powerful one-off effects

Between the worker placement aspect of the orbital stations, and the territory control of the planet board, there is a whole pile of interaction here. Mostly indirect - taking things that others want - but also with some direct shot-across-the-bow type moves like the Raider's Outpost and some alien tech cards. Alien techs are bonus upgrades can be purchased via one of the orbital stations, and usually have a reusable activated form and a one-off discard power. Mostly these discard powers relate to territories and their colonies. Relocating colonies between territories, forbidding further colony placements in an area, and adding extra victory points to controlled territories are all possible (but don't then lose control of that area you just turned into a juicy double VP target!). The raider outpost station allows you to pillage resources or alien tech cards from the other players by placing a 'straight' of dice (eg a 3, 4 and 5). A powerful leg up at the cost of becoming a target for future aggression. A passive game this is not, you'll be keenly watching and negotiating during other players turns, eloquently explaining why someone else deserves the knife in the back when that straight gets rolled up.

I had some initial concerns about the randomness inherent in having the dice determine your placements, but in practice this is handled very well. Alien Frontiers has a lot in common with an older dice placement game Kingsburg, however the major improvement in this game is that rolling high is not strictly better. Kingsburg also allowed you different placements depending on what you rolled, but higher dice values were always better, so over the course of the game careful selection of your available actions became secondary to the values rolled. Players who rolled higher could expect to do better no matter their choices. Not so in Alien Frontiers, where all the action spaces are quite well balanced. Multiple spaces have no absolute value requirement, looking instead for pairs etc, and those that are served better by higher values are balanced by stations like the market where low rolls are key, and the colony constructor which provides a place for all your otherwise unhelpful dice to make a meaningful contribution. All randomness is not created equal, and this mechanic really demonstrates well the different between pre and post decision randomness. Deciding on a course of action and then rolling dice to see if you are successful is almost always worse than rolling first to determine what actions you are able to take. This allows you to have the variation of randomness without the feeling of taking away control or outright wasting your actions. Sometimes you still won't get what you want but that plays into the worker placement concept. The overall feeling is one of working out the best options with what you have, rather than being frustrated with dice that didn't come up a particular way.

A pile of tuckboxes included for all the components! Attention every other game - do this.

Production wise everything about this game is great. Alien Frontiers is now in its 4th edition and has benefited from several enhancements to the components over time. Colonies are represented by cute little plastic cities in transparent domes now, compared to simple coloured wood tokens in the first edition. The 3 control field tokens also have individual plastic markers instead of cardboard chits, and the gorgeous board is double sided entirely to support the use of Rocket Dice D6s if you happen to have some, which is a lovely touch. This is also the first game I've seen that includes flat-packed, labelled tuck boxes for all the components. One for each players dice and markers, and individual boxes for the cards, resource tokens, and so on. This is a brilliant addition, every game that doesn't have a custom insert should include something like this. It just makes organisation so much easier and is a clear step up from having all the bits in plastic baggies or just piled into an undivided box. It's such a small thing that just did wonders for my appreciation of the game when I opened the box and saw them, top move.

The whole board is duplicated on the reverse side but with spaces suitable for rocket D6s

The components and board also convey the theme well, and the bright and colourful space colonist setting is a nice change from what is often a very dry genre. Yes scifi is a bit overdone I suppose but what can I say, I prefer it to subsistence farming or French castle construction as a wrapper for the worker placement mechanics. The abstraction of dice as "ships" is honestly pretty weak, but it's something you forget about near instantly. They're your workers and it's a worker placement game, I've never really been bothered by action pawns being appropriately themed. On the broader view the space colonisation concept just works, and the dice don't take you out of the scene. The mechanics are good enough that it isn't trying to skate by on theme anyway, so it's a solid part of the package but not the main selling point.

Little improvements in presentation over earlier editions, cute plastic figures replacing plain round wood tokens

Overall I really enjoy getting Alien Frontiers to the table. To me it represents an ideal midweight worker placement game, something that you can use to introduce people to the concept that's a bit more involved than say Stone Age or Lords of Waterdeep, which can feel a bit lacking after a few repeat plays. It's also got a more accessible theme and clearer lines of play so it's not as overwhelming as the gold standards of Agricola or Caylus, occupying a nice middle ground where even if you're a fan of weightier games you'll still be able to enjoy bringing this out with new players or as a more relaxed option. A key point in its favour is that while you'll learn to develop better, more coherent strategies over repeated plays, you'll at least have some idea of what to do from game one. Actions on any given turn being restricted to the placements you have valid dice rolls for really helps cut down on the AP that can occur when you're staring at a board full of action spaces you don't understand well. It's neat, it's engaging, and it doesn't outstay it's welcome, always managing to end at just the right point. Plus there's an iOS version with AI & pass-and-play if you want to give it a try first. Alien Frontiers is the title that more than any other shows that boardgame kickstarters aren't always a horrible mess, sometimes there's a real gem of a game there. Give this one a shot.