SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence

The rotating solar system board is no doubt the star of the show, planets physically shift position between rounds, and that single piece of physical design does more thematic work than most games manage with a whole rulebook of flavor text. It’s an exceedingly elegant mechanic in how it provides a constantly changing state that impacts everything you’re doing, rather than a random event card pretending to be orbital mechanics.

Underneath the spinning board is a card-driven engine builder, and the multi-use cards are the real mechanical heart of it. Every card can be played for its main effect, tucked into your engine for end-of-round income, or discarded for a resource, and figuring out what to use each card for is exactly the kind of tight, crunchy decision space I look for in a heavier euro. Revealing the alien races switches the dynamic mid-game as new point goals come online, and that twist is a nice surprise the first time it happens, though I’ll admit by my third play I was hunting for it rather than being caught off guard.

First play ran us easily up to four hours with four players, with a large chunk of that time spent as downtime while other players worked through moves that not only require some thinking but take a while to execute once decided. That’s the actual dealbreaker for some of my group, downtime that scales badly with player count is death for a weeknight game, and this one asks for a serious time commitment before it clicks. Once everyone knows their own board and isn’t stopping to relearn icons, decisions get made faster and later plays moved noticeably quicker, but that first session is a real toll.

I don’t think I need to own this long-term. Simply having bad luck with the cards can leave you scrambling for pieces to build an engine out of, and there’s real luck sitting inside a game that otherwise wants to feel like pure engine optimization. But every time it’s hit the table I’ve had a good time, this is a surprisingly thematic euro about space exploration, doing more than I expected from what sounded on paper like just another euro reskin.