SETI and the gulf between love & hate - TCbH Review

do you ever find yourself caught in between loving and kind of resenting a thing for the reasons that you expected to love it I mean yeah it may just be exactly what you're into with a creamy center and a candy coated shell but you start to get such distilled and blown up proportions of Awesomeness that the cracks reveal themselves more and more to the point where they might become near unassailable Gulfs and so I guess what I'm saying is it's time that we talk about SE seti or the search for extra tasty intelligence is a dense strategy game about using resources over five rounds to deply compete for scientific glory in the field of xenobiology each turn you take an action listed on and eventually upgraded on your Tableau to move probes to various bodies in our solar system hold press conferences to rally support in the form of permanent upgrades and ping the stars for delightful blue noblets of information with what can only be described as an insane bit of completely inconsequential production flurry binary messages all the while as rounds conclude press conferences are held in the wheels of the universe turn and I mean that quite literally because one of the central gimmicks of this game is that for various reasons and at least once each round the solar system rotates in either small medium or got to have it sized rotations around the Sun both changing proximity for probe purposes and aligning Earth with a new section of the Stars to broadcast contact this Central conceit is fascinating beautiful and a maddening obstacle to work around and I mean that I mean one moment you think you got a handle on things and then the next boom you got a meteor blocking your way to Neptune here because some other player passed out of the round this in theory encourages forethought and risk assessment but in practice it just ended up being something that was either completely ignored until it was way too late and then cursed for its disruption of your grand minations or it encouraged overly conservative in opportunistic play hey honey Saturn's nearby today let's go for a spin as player navigate the solar system and trade Snapchats with the Stars they'll gain points for resources media momentum and most importantly evidence of extraterrestrial life and three flavors which once those flavors have been allocated to either side of the top of the board boom one of the two out of five possible but you totally know that they have a bajillion in the expansion pipeline aliens are revealed which sets up a new mini game for scoring points sometimes with new cards and Rule sets from a pickup and delivery system above buug dudes to a powerful technology that warrants negative points for the player who uses it the most once five rounds conclude the player with the most points earned during the game and through Milestones claimed throughout but fulfilled at the end wins okay so broadly speaking does this all make sense I mean there's a lot but I think we got the majority of it and we're not in the business doing how to plays here just enough context for critical analysis so we got our our Baseline going yeah we're good okay so this game is effing Bonkers it's a space fairing sandbox of incredibly impressive interlocking elements that are in some way so crisply tuned that they start to lose all meaning like saying tuna 10 times in a row tuna tuna tuna tuna tuna as you sit down it's a feast of possibility with very little restricting you outside of resources so you do the obvious thing which is Euro game you invest play cards or take actions like get resources back maybe get some income production cards and maximize but how this takes shape where you try to invest what points you try to take out of the board because they're freaking everywhere that's a little hard to sus out because of the constantly shifting landscape both the board itself with the stars aligning based off of where Earth is in Orbit to the sun and the shifting land scape set by the freaking aliens which are priority defining and in some ways breaking because you don't know what aliens are going to be revealed so you can't necessarily account on specific things happening and you don't know exactly when or even if they're going to be revealed in the game so you don't really have a lot of Guiding Light other than just saying well I don't know I'm going to do this thing because it seems like a good thing to do right now and maybe I'll rep prioritize later this feeling of being a drift amongst the intricacies of an unsympathetic and if not hostile at least mildly irritated solar system means at least for me less emotional investment which I hate because I love so much about the game and concept cool exploration among a shifting Landscape Red action and resource economy awesome jockeying for best position in sectors of communication and planets um first to get a type of upgrade aliens that might not actually reveal because they're totally optional elements of the game wait what in truth every time I played SE I've had fun but that fun was accompanied by a not insignificant amount of frustration and not really knowing how best to lean and whether playing Solo or with other players I found a lot of unpredictability and success which would be okay in a lighter game or a game with a ton of random elements but this isn't random in the way that dice rolls or card flips are random all those juicy points in Euro iconography are on the table for you to see inviting you to just get a glimpse through the Matrix but the breadth of variables and unpredictability of certain things just makes the long-term planning kind of opaque this is a game where you're thinking a couple of turns ahead rarely rounds which if you meet it on its level has moments of greatness having the upgrade to probe launching and movement to put Landers on planets and scoop up alien biology to flip over and discover new societies feels really cool and most things you put your mind to you can do eventually and have a really Dynamic sequence a play it's just hard to know was that good was that better than what I could have spent the last five actions doing this round solo and low player counts are where I think the game most shines giving you time and flexibility to invest and consider to ring the most out of the stars and our new totally not going to kill us for exploiting them space Pals with solo driven by cards dictating an otoma that's more involved than I typically like but that's mainly because of the breadth of systems in the game rather than the otoma design it's overall a good consolidation aping a player with multiple levels of difficulty there's something to admire in Si's uncompromising refute of modernity from its interesting pieces to its Buck Wild shaped board and having a Euro with unknown pairs of systems only possibly revealed when while making you feel like you're always just shy of the capability to meaningfully participate in even half of the stuff on the table but in spite of loving a lot of what it offers I only love it in Parts in moments where it shines past the frustration and the emptiness that it otherwise makes me feel which isn't the type of gaming that I want to do if you love sprawling dense Euros with exploratory elements and particularly ones where you can dig your teeth into solo then said may be right up your alley but otherwise it's a spectacle worth seeing but not one that I think most people need to own and that's our review but let me know what is a game that you are caught in between loving and hating and maybe hating because of the things that you thought you were going to love about it put it in the comments and as always thanks for watching thanks for being such an awesome Community you know that I've been Jack for the cardboard Herald