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In the year 1972, SAGA (The Space and Aeronautics Global Alliance) successfully completed the first ever hyperspace trip to Mars. But celebrations were cut short when the crew of the Mercury 3 rocket missed their reentry window and an explosion damaged the ship. Now, you must work together to bring the rocket and the crew home safely.
Mission Control: Critical Orbit is an asymmetric, cooperative, roll and write, real-time rescue adventure. One player takes on the role of the Aethernaut Flight Commander, and up to 3 players take on the roles of Flight Controllers. Each of the Controller players have unique tasks that earn tools the Aethernaut player needs to restore oxygen and critical systems to the damaged rocket. If the Aethernaut can build a path with polyominoes before the 20 minute timer runs out, you win! But if you run out time the ship suffers a catastrophic failure causing the Mercury 3 rocket to explode in orbit… and everyone loses.
—description from the publisher
- cool giveaway passes with pictures
- innovative cooperative gameplay
- liked the real-time aspect
- fun to play even for non-real-time fans
- one player's mini-game (Sudoku) was very basic
- Connecting valves, managing oxygen, fixing broken pipes
- Space, Mission Control (Houston, Germany)
- Players communicate information across different roles (Cosmonaut/Ethernet, Houston, Germany) to achieve a common goal.
- Captain Sonar
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
- cooperative play — All players work together to achieve a common victory condition.
- Pattern Building — Players place polyomino shapes on their boards to connect valves.
- Roll and Write — Players roll dice and use the results to fill in shapes on their boards and achieve objectives.
- Set Collection — Players collect specific valve pieces and oxygen icons to win.
Video topics + discussion points
Quotes (from this video)
- boom without a print it's back they just brought it back with uh new art
- basically one person picks up these three cards and they have like that's a certain type of person they're looking for
- i found the trouble with those games like i think they're fun to play but i think it's kind of weird when you give one person the power to assign the points
- i didn't it's not cool like i'm probably never gonna book another uh like demo with them again because it was like it's that's just not i don't think that's cool
- power chord call of cthulhu look at this now board and dice do awesome games i love board and day stuff
- scout is uh i i don't know what this is but it's a tiny little game and everybody's talking about it
- no bad karma is great
References (from this video)
- Unique real-time cooperative format
- Puzzles vary per player and are engaging
- Hard to play at 2 players; AI cards suggested for low player counts
- space exploration and mission control dynamics
- Space mission control; oxygen supply race
- cooperative, real-time puzzle solving
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
- polyomino_placement — Main mission-control player uses polyomino-like placements
- real_time — Players solve puzzles within a 20-minute time frame
Video topics + discussion points
Quotes (from this video)
- we're actually close to a pretty big milestone 100 we've almost played 100 rolling rights
- check out the next video to see if he tells us a joke
- I think it's one of the best rolling right implementations of a board game that I've played