Orbitstar in about 3 minutes
Transcript
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G'day go to and welcome to Orbit Star in about 3 minutes. Prototype copy used. Aetherworks Games also published my game Shadow Moon Syndicate. It has a solo mode. It's a game for one to four players. Playing time is long and it's a moderately complex game. You are a scientist visiting an alien world. You'll fly around the planet discovering new species, observing their behavior, and leaving no traces of your passing. Can you be the most accomplished scientist of all? The game ends shortly after any player score marker passes the player count threshold here. The winner is the player with the most points, which you get from interacting with different animals and end-game awards. Action selection. You have three actions each turn chosen from this list. Bag building. You'll be upgrading the contents of this bag. Advancement tracks. You'll get bonuses by moving up these tracks. Player turn. Set up your player board with buttons on each tracker, three home markers, and all nine skills points locked. Get your starting discs as shown on your board and then draw a player card. Upgrade the skill shown and gain that disc. All those discs go into your bag. Then draw seven of them to start the game. Start each player turn by drawing an event and resolving the top half. Repeat this each turn pushing the event cards right. Once they reach the discard, resolve the bottom half. On your turn, you'll take three actions. Your hovercraft starts on Orbit Star so your first action is to move to an arrive spot on the planet.
You may take move actions between different biomes paying the cost shown. And when you are in a biome, you can echo-locate paying the cost shown on the board. Draw and reveal an alien card that matches the terrain. Studying a creature is another action. Each alien has traits. Here that's concealed and fast. To succeed, you will need to build a matching dial with your discs. Here we spend two white discs as though they are one yellow. That lets us mark one fast spot on the creature. For another action, we try using concealed. Here we can make the match without using substitutions. So we gain that extra spot. And because we have the advanced option unlocked, we can do three. That finishes the study off, giving us one point for each disk and a bonus point for the spot. Studying also grants us improvements, track those here. Purple disks are wild cards, but they are discarded once used. When your actions are done, move all disks used to exhausted. The rest action lets you draw to your limit shown here and get back exhausted disks shown here. Having a supply pod will recover even more. Some effects will cause damage, and if you run out of whole markers, you are knocked down. Other players may rescue you for a bonus, but you recover anyway next turn. When you get back to Orbit Star, return all disks to the bag and claim a scoring option here. And finally, you also have these special powers which you can use on your turn by spinning the magic disk. Why would you like this game? I love fiction that's presented as non-fiction, and this game is based on a book survey of an alien world, and I think that's an amazing premise for a game. There are two big standout things for me mechanically. One is how the players can complete alien cards and share rewards. This leads to a funny mix of poaching points and helpfulness among the players. The other is how you move from arrive to explore
the end of your turn. And if you aren't explore the end of your turn, bad stuff happens. So, the game forces you not to camp and to keep moving about. That combined with the claiming goals gives the game a real sense of momentum and urgency, which I like. It's also a decolonized game. There's no capturing of alien samples, and you're not doing violence to them. It's very much leave only footprints, and even then, you don't leave those as you're in a hover cone. I recommend Orbit Star to people who like the idea of racing to explore an alien world. Uh, best thing about this game is its creative mix of competitive and cooperative elements. It never feels extremely adversarial, but you're very aware of what others are doing. However, I think the strong suit of Orbit Star is its player interaction and how you can poach discoveries off other players, working together on projects, and to rescue each other. As a result, I didn't enjoy the solo mode remotely as much as playing with people.
Bobby Hill is known for Hadrian's Wall and the Anarchy. And as mentioned, Arcus's last game was my very own Shadow Moon Syndicate. Orbit Star, survey says, gold medal game. And if you enjoyed this video, hit the notification button, like, share, and subscribe to the channel.