Macao, Part 2 (Alien Frontiers)

If you missed my earlier Macao review, you can click on the label below to find it.

Alien Frontiers follows the "dice is your life" mechanic, that Macao and Stone Age adhere to. You don't know how the game is going to play, because your dice do their own thing...and so do other people's dice.

It was funded as a Kickstarter project - interesting. It's already sold through the first print run on a small press, so they're going back again. The first print run has some unique things to it, and the second one will have some cleaned up parts. Fun. (As of this article, first printings go for $100, preorders for second run are $39, for sometime in 2011.)

I played two games, over a Buy Nothing day game celebration. The first one was a 4-player game, where I struggled to build ships. You start off with three - represented by your 3 six-sided dice. You can build 3 more, each one costing slightly more...but they are your game. A person with 6 dice (maximum) is doing slightly more than twice as much as someone with 3. The extra dice give you better number spreads to do bigger things...as you can see, building ships is mandatory.

The goal is to place colonies on a moon. Each colony is a VP, and if you have the most in a territory, you get another one as well as a special ability unique to that territory.

There are methods for stealing from other people, varied alien technologies to research, getting fuel and rock, and a couple of ways of building colonies...all of which use your ships/dice in different ways. Triples, doubles, 3-dice runs, as raw dice, as numbers...and you'll block up those choices for others, until your turn comes around and you remove your dice from where they were.

I think 90% of this game is the interaction with other players. Yes, rolling your dice and getting good numbers is necessary for a smooth game. But placing your colonies to mess with other players, or bumping people around...destroying another player's ship - the interaction feels like little bumps as you nudge your way through the racecourse. (Destroying a ship is more like shooting out their tire, but it's almost like bumping.)

It's fun with the right people. And the table circles around tearing down the current 1st place player, which has its own issues. And if you believe that you have bad dice luck, you'll be suffering the whole time. But I won't turn down playing it another 2-3 times, for sure.