Other Stuff Monthly #16

 Back in early 2018, I backed a game on Kickstarter called Crypt. It was a fun little dice game about a bunch of scheming princes and princess who want the king's treasure, despite all being left out of his will. When the same people had another campaign in mid-2019 to fund their next game, Afternova, I naturally backed that one, too. Unfortunately, my copy arrived literally the day the Covid-19 lockdown started in the UK, so it sat unplayed on a shelf for a few months. But now I've had a couple of games of it, and it definitely lives up to its predecessor!

 

The game sees the players recruiting various space-faring engineers, to mine planets for different coloured minerals, which in turn are used to build spaceship parts. Some of the spaceship parts add new abilities, like more storage space to store minerals, or getting to draw extra cards at certain times,  while others are just worth victory points at the end of the game. 

 

The real hook of the game is that it can be difficult to recruit  all the engineers you need to mine the planet you want, so you can negotiate with other players, agreeing how to divvy up the planet's yield in exchange for the use of their engineers. So you have to balance out getting the minerals you need, while trying to keep your opponentsaway from all the ones they need. It obviously gets harder to negotiate towards the end of the game, as the game ends when one player finishes six spaceship parts, leaving everyone else one last turn to do score what they can.

 

Playtime is about half an hour, and it goes by pretty quickly. The whole game is a combination of negotiation and resource management (not just the literal resources of the negineers and minerals, but also the space needed to keep them, as you can only hold eight cards and four minerals at a time), and there's very little reliance on luck, so winning or losing does depend on who was the better player that game.

 

I've enjoyed every game I've played so far of Afternova, and it's pretty cheap as far as decent board games go, so I definitely recommend picking it up, as long as you have at least two other people with whom to play it. It's also got a ton of silly animal puns on the engineer cards, which is a nice bonus!