We Just Played SETI - One of the Best Games of the Year!

Emily and I just played and by that I mean recently just played uh seti this is a new one from cge we played it the other night so this is actually not a game in progress this is actually the setup of the game cuz we're going to play right after this we I don't know if we're going to do that uh we' got other games to play but we want to play this because spoiler alert we both like like it a lot uh and in fact Emily likes it so much that we're going to take a day collect our thoughts record we took two days and she's played two more times two more times CU she took the game she took the game so I couldn't play it again uh but we've got it set up here and just to give you an idea of what you're looking at we've got the solar system board here which is where a lot of the action's going to take place we're going to be launching probes from the middle here moving those probes out throughout the solar system we're going to be scanning different sectors we're also going to be potentially taking those probes as you can see to various planets and if we orbit or land on them those will go over here uh all of these things are going to score us some points get us some bonuses uh but all of it is in the interest of finding alien traces or trace evidence of alien life because the game is called steady yes so what we're really doing is we're going to have two aliens out here there's five to begin with in the box and you're randomly going to put out two the main goal we're trying to get to is we're trying to get these pink yellow and blue alien traces about life and when we do that we get to actually mark them with our own little thing once we've marked all three for an alien species we can and then actually flip it over there's going to be a bunch more stuff to do the each come with their own uh usually their own deck sometimes their own components um and a whole bunch more it's like it's like the new part of the game comes alive when you reveal the two alien species and we have played games that do something similar along those lines but I got to tell you it's been a long time since there's been such a situation where it feels like such a new yeah uh scenario for the game cuz you're sitting there you're playing you know that you're supposed to be collecting traces and that doesn't really stop you want to continue collecting traces of those alien life to kind of interact with them and operate on their boards to obviously score points but those boards are going to behave very differently from one another and like Emily said all of them have decks of cards and you're going to get some of those cards all those cards work completely different from one another a lot of them are going to put little tokens out along the score track that will trigger uh and when you get the alien everyone's going to put one like so such a distance from their current score position and once they get there they're able together to do a thing uh so it's really interesting and it really brings the whole theme together um and this designer Thomas hok or thas hok did also Galileo galile yes which is very cool the same year and he also did a third one right Tea Garden all three of these games came out at this and Galileo Galilee are interesting cuz thematically they have some uh common threads you know that one is kind of the origins of looking up to the stars and this is more current in terms of actually reaching all the way out to Ali in life but again it has to do with the solar system there's some rotating also going on but at its core what we're really doing here is we're doing action selection so on your turn you're just going to choose one main action unlimited free actions um but there's not too many to keep track of um and then you are just going to go to the next person keep going back and forth until we pass we're going to do it over 5 years and that's going to be it the main actions are going to be like you said putting out a probe we always start at Earth um and that is just a main action you put out a probe that's that is one of the main actions that your turn is done yes you could do a free action to spend an energy to move somewhere in the solar system there's some things with movements like when you move on a planet you'll get some publicity when you move through asteroids they're like Rocky terrain they're hard to leave um or you can even discard cards so the cards are a big part of this play too A lot of the cards have on their Corner um you can discard them for movement um so that's another way to move around the solar system the next action you can take is that you can actually get that probe and put it on a planet so if this is now at Venus I can land this Probe on Venus itself um or I can have it orbiting Venus the first person to do it is going to get some extra bonuses you always want to be first to it but anybody who does this and you have unlimited spots can get the actual rewards from it so either six points in an income or if you land on it five points in a trace yeah those were the traces we were talking about that's one of the main ways to get the traces in the game is the yellow traces are when you land on planets so that's one way to kind of the main thing of Victory here yeah and another thing you can do on your turn one of the main actions is to scan scanning is going to lead more often than not to Pink traces yes when you scan uh you're going to potentially do multiple scans but at the beginning of the game you're going to be doing two the first scan you're going to do is from Earth so you're always going to look where Earth is and look at that sector and if I scanned right now I would necessarily be scanning here when you do that you're going to take one of these data pieces of data you're going to bring it to your player board more on that in a second and you're going to replace that data with one of your pieces and as you can imagine this is going to ultimately fill up and it will ultimately be an area majority situation where this kind of gets reset and the person who wins it is going to put their piece here score five points and get a trace you know this is where you're going to potentially get those pink traces and like Emily said at the beginning we want those traces early on to open up those aliens yes and then also to interact with them because that's where really some of the big points come into play yeah I think two things that are interesting with the scans are that the second person who puts their scan out is actually the one who's going to get two points so it's a very cool little thing with timing also whenever we resolve them it'll be at the end of a turn when it's Phil um and we'll see who got second place that person will get to keep one of their scans in here so it's seated for the next time and then you can keep getting majorities and majorities so if you're playing in a four-person game even if you don't win it one time you're like oh I was so close you still get seated for the next one and so then hopefully you can get it the next time around um and there are ways to upgrade this so that you're doing even more scanning on the same turn yeah we'll talk about upgrades in a second but yeah you can do a ton of scanning if you upgrade a lot when you scan you're like I'll do this and I'll do this and I'll do this and that's one way you can kind of interact with this and say okay I'll scan from Earth oh and then I can this other way it allows me to scan the same sector and get the second spot right away to get those two points not not to mention two of the four spaces in this majority exactly and a lot of them have to do with the cards again so like the second way you're scanning that you're starting with is you are looking at the row of three cards that are face up and in the top right corner there's going to be a color of scan so we have yellow black and blue out here right now I can choose any of those uh if I chose the black one I can scan it then either of the black sectors so I could do the same one I just did and get those two points probably pretty smart or I could do the other one and just leave those two points all up for grabs for later I don't know how smart that is but you might want to jump on some of these just to sort of shirt tail onto some of that AA majority because like Emily said even if you don't win you might be seated for the next round plus everyone's still going to get publicity for actually doing something there um but when you get this data it's going to go onto your player board um and it's a free action again to actually move them onto the different spaces across the bottom you want to do do that because the next action you could take to get those blue traces is you can analyze your data when you have all six of them you'll pay an energy you get a blue Trace so you get yellow traces from planets pink traces from scanning blue traces from data and that's how you get the aliens that's how you get the traces and the game will build in that respect because early on you're going to have limited amount of resources and in fact throughout the game you're going to feel like you have limited amount of resources it should be said this is one of those games where you get resources between rounds and your round is dictated by making the most of those resources now with that said like we mentioned there are multiuse cards you're able to get a little bit more out of these there's also some tradeoffs you can like trade I think what two cards for just anyone two resources for uh one other yeah so you can kind of find unique ways um one of the most unique ways you can find different routes to making things happen are the actual cards and playing the cards yes so a main action you can take is you can play a card on your turn when you play a card it's going to cost some amount of currency and then it's going to give you some kind of action or some kind of big thing um for example this card that I have here is going to give me a data so just a data for free um it's going to spin the solar system and it's going to give me a tech a blue Tech so the last thing we haven't talked about yet is that you can use your publicity you're getting to get Technologies or you could just find a card that gives you a technology for three three money um when you do this you're going to spend up to six publicity and also rotate the solar system the Texs are the main way that the solar system is going to be moving um which is quite cool really because the first time you do it it's going to do the innermost move the second time it's going to do the middle one and the third time it's going to do all three of them and I was really impressed actually with how well this works um in terms of physically yes physically like it's not like it's they don't move too much it looks they don't push each other except the right ones push the right ones because of you know what gravity but it has a cool system because like if I have a probe here and then we're going to rotate and move into this then my probe moves it gets moved around the solar system which is pretty cool um the other thing that when you're getting the upgrades you're actually getting new texts so there are new texts that are helping you with probes and putting them on planets there are new texts that are helping you with signals and scanning the side and there are new probes there are new texts that are helping you with data and getting more currency and more different things you can use throughout the round while you put that data down yeah all of these up upgrades really just help you do what you do in the game I think the only other thing I'd add to that is the orange ones that are about the probes those effectively let you break some rules you know a lot of them are like you can normally do it this way but if you have this upgrade you don't it costs less the scanning is mostly all about just enhancing the amount of scanning that you're going to do and all of those upgrades allow you to scan in a number of different ways I think the last upgrade has nothing to do with scanning yeah it's more about tying it with the probe because then you get launcher probe for cheaper or get a movement yeah but if you've upgraded all of your scans when you scan everyone else is going to be jealous of what you're doing because you're going to scan like four times and you're going to be looking at the cards out here you're going to be looking at cards in your hands you're going to be looking where Earth is and you're getting a lot of potential majority and there are some instances where if you have the right cards in your hand the right cards here and Earth is in the right spot you can scan scan scan potentially in the same sector getting three of those spaces that might a give you majority but B it might really help you just finish one of those things off so you can score at the end of the your turn yeah and like you were saying this game is really about like limited resources and then stretching those out in the best way possible so the cards are going to give you a lot of flexibility to do things differently than you have otherwise um also the variability of when the aliens come out which aliens come out how they're going to interact with the board plus we have some endgame scoring and those are they're four of them that come out each game uh they're double-sided but the combinations of them really does make a difference in what you're going to end up going for throughout the game um I was playing one and I was going for landing on moons a lot but I didn't do any scanning and that ended up really hurting me in scoring because the scoring was for who could do both of them the most um so it felt very variable from game to game even though we're doing the same things how you're actually making use of the cards you get when you get them yeah I mean obviously you're going to get different cards but like em Emily said those endgame scoring tiles you definitely have to pay attention if you played one way one game and those tiles are flipped a different way the next you've got to really pay attention you played another game where you didn't launch one pro I didn't launch a single prob that game which is she told me that it it sounds crazy uh but you you know she was spending her time just scanning obviously I assume you upgraded this yes I did very much so you're able to scan a ton and get a lot of those traces now you might not have been getting a lot well you weren't getting any yellow traces probably I was though because I was getting it from cards exactly so that's where the cards they really add a whole new dimension to this um and the one action we didn't talk about is that if you don't want to do anything else you can keep taking free actions you can pass on your turn and when you pass that's also going to orbit the uh the solar system and you're going to get to choose a card um there's always going to be player count plus one and you'll get to choose from there so you have a little bit of options of like okay what am I trying to get done Honestly though looking at these cards they always tempt me to kind of change my route that I'm going for sure these cards definitely dangle some carrots they also you're going to want to look at them thoroughly and you don't get a lot of cards right so we start with what like five cards in our hand and we tuck One to begin with and you tuck one of those you're going to have four and when you tuck that is how you get production ultimately so there's just a few of opportunities to do that in the game one of them is if you collect data one of the spots you're going to put the data on will allow you to tuck one of your cards I found that you wanted to tuck it's very satisfying to tuck a lot of those cards because when production comes around and you're like oh I'm getting five money and four energy and people are like wait how are and it just sets you up for much a much more satisfying round so production is really interesting not to mention some of those endgame scoring tiles will encourage you to form your production in certain ways you might want to get a lot of energy cards tucked or a lot of credits or a nice mix of all three exactly and the other way that you can actually tuck them is going through the sky when you are putting orbits down um so you're really again what I love about this game is that you were forced to kind of do a little bit of everything like you said though I had that one game where I didn't launch any probes so it's really allowing you to say like which way do you want to take as a path to Victory um one thing I will say is we've only played a two player and I feel this game is going to be very different at a higher player count yeah I think it will play a lot differently now with that said we've enjoyed it quite yes quite a lot at two players now I've just only played it the one time you've played it three times now two players I can only imagine it being better four players I do think with all of the potential that you have to look at your cards and go oh how can I get these things done for some players it might slow it down a four-player game of this is probably going to take a minut it yeah but in our two playay how was your last two-player game did it go pretty quick it was very fast cuz our first one it was a learning game so it took a little longer but I think if Emily and I played it again we could knock this out pretty quickly what the box says what 40 minut 4 minutes per and I think two experienced players playing a two- player could probably even get that down a little I believe that to it does ramp in the first few rounds felt very quick because you don't have any resources or very little you've set up very little like Bo you've set up very little but I'd say it's in the third of the five rounds that it starts to Pivot and feel like oh now we're getting a lot more done but even in the third round not as much as in the fourth and the fifth fourth and the fifth feels like okay now we can do a lot of well they're very rewarding you're getting a lot of points throughout the game I will say that your point marker is going to move um but when the aliens come out you can make some really big moves like in the game we played I had a turn where I jumped like 20 some points yeah I think even more than that because I think you had two that were 15p pointers so you did like 30 points plus whatever you were getting for the things you actually doing on your turn it was crazy and you can have big turns like that right like as long as you can string these things out it's very clever the way this is put together because the currencies you're using for playing cards for getting things out for doing the main actions are not the same currencies you're getting if you do the free actions like discarding cards so you're always looking for little ways to be like ah how do I make this one currency a different currency because that's what I need to do this one action that will finally get me the thing I want yeah the other cool thing about the score track and how that works is I felt motivated not just by the score itself but bu some of those things that were happening on the score track in a two-player game for example the first thing is there's this sort of neutral player that has markers at 20 and 30 when one of us passes that in fact when either of us pass it one of these markers comes out here to help flip those aliens now once both aliens are flipped these markers don't do anything but it does help make you know sort of the pace work but when those aliens come out at least the two that we had they're putting things out on the board sometimes it's Unique to you sometimes it's for everyone and we you know one of them gave us some unique cards that weren't really part of our hand and there were points around the board at which we could actually yes choose if we wanted to to play one of those cards uh face down and it would give us some potential end of game scoring but also a potential penalty there was like a bit of a risk reward it's very unique and the score track itself has these parts that allow you to interact in the endgame scoring because those tiles you have to kind of claim them so when someone passes the 25 Mark if you're the first player you get your first pick of whatever of these scoring tiles you think you're going to score not only that but you're going to be able to take the first spot which is going to net you the most points for that particular type of scoring and that can be huge because the difference between the 11 and eight points if we both get three sets that's a big difference there right so um you really want to say like okay maybe I should just like race to some early points uh right at the beginning so that way I can put my markers out there or you could say like I'm going to take my time a little bit here I'm going to slow roll it at first just so I can make sure I have them on the right things since I'm only going to get to claim three out of the four in the full game um and then choose the ones that are really going to benefit my strategy yeah that is really important because if you run up to 25 too fast and you've not really set yourself up you're pretty much throwing a dart and going well I guess I'll do this one because I'm closest to it optimally you have at least one one of those if you could go here knowing I've got 11 points already instead of like I hope to get 11 maybe 22 that's maybe not the thing to do yeah again the last thing I wanted to mention is the theme the theme for me really feels like it's there all throughout at first before you flip those aliens you get what you're doing and you're like sort of searching the night skies you're scanning things it feels very thematic you're literally launching probes and moving them around all those sorts of things in a euro game like this help make you feel like you're doing the things that you're thematically doing but I'll tell you when those aliens flip then it really feels like oh wow this really not just theme but it just adds this dash of I wouldn't even say narrative but it kind of feels like there's these events happening and these events have flavor and not only flavor but they have like not thematic and mechanical impact on the game to where you're like oh really oh now I'm going to do this and you might actually it really defines how you're going to play the rest of the game and I would say again that adds to the variability because no two games are going to be the same even though in the first two games I played with you and with my friend we got the same two aliens crazy uh just by random chance but we got them at different times and also like one was they switched the order but also very different times in the game so like when we played ours I think we didn't get our second alien out until maybe the third maybe even the four it was later it was very late um but in my game with my other friend we got it out I think the first round um honestly it was very very quick and so it made a huge difference on like How likely people were to use it to interact with it and to interact with that part of like the story especially yeah it is a really interesting game this is SEI we're really glad we played it because we're about to uh put together our top 10 list for the year and spoiler alert I'm guessing this one's going to be on at least both of our top 10 lists um but stay tuned for that and be sure to watch that but yeah if you have any questions about this one at all please make them in the comments below and of course until next time make sure everyone has fun at the table