Ad Astra Review

I finally fit in a game of Ad Astra. I saw it on a friend's game table once, and thought - it has exploration, trading...great! This is for me...but maybe I should play it before buying another space game.

We played a 4-player game - it can handle five. The core of the game is playing your action cards into order. Maybe you want your exploration card put early in the turn order, or a production card placed at the end of the round. This is the actual game, not the giant space board that covers most of the table.

You start with a factory in the home system, and a spaceship in "deep space" (one space away from every system). After everyone has placed action cards into the order hopper (12 spaces, 4 players - we each put in 3 cards), start by revealing the card in the first position.

Ah, Red played Explore a small yellow system or explore a large red system. Red gets to move one of their spaceships to one of those systems, or jump a spaceship from any system to deep space. If you move into an unexplored system, you get to choose which facedown planet you take. Everyone else gets the same movement option, then Red can move more ships.

The next card might be a Production card by Blue, where the Blue player chooses which mode of the card happens - produce resource A or resource B. Everyone gets that resource, if they have spaceships, colonies, or factories on that resource from a planet.

The action card types are Explore, Production, Build, Trade, and Score. (Build lets everyone build one thing, based on their resource cards in hand, and the person who put it in can build whatever; Trade lets that player and that player only to trade with other players, or 2-for-1 with the bank.)

Score cards are modal as well - choose to score all colonies/factories or spaceships. Whoever gets the most points from a score card also gets 3 bonus points. Each player has the same three different Score cards...and you only get them back after you've used all of them (preventing a player from playing the same Score card every turn).

The Explore part is weak. Trade is weak. Build is unexciting. Production becomes a question of if you've overlapped with other players or if you specialized in a resource. (Some or all/nothing.) Score cards are a reflection of what you've done on the board (again, some points or all/nothing).

They have a light alien/chance card effect, but the alien cards were pretty weak. Ad Astra looks really awesome, but the action takes place elsewhere. I'll probably end up playing it again, but probably not for several years.