Designed by:
In Space Base every player is running their own base, populated by spaceships that will reward you depending on what dice you – and your opponents – roll.
Everyone starts with their base in front of them and a ship in each of the 12 bays. The bays are numbered 1-12 and when a ship is activated (by a dice roll) it triggers a reward for you: money, income, or points. On your turn you roll the dice and can choose to activate the two numbers you rolled, or their sum: e.g. if you roll a 4 and a 5, you may activate the ships in bays 4 and 5 or a single ship in bay 9.
Having done so, you have the option to purchase a ship, paying the price in money. Whatever the price of the ship, your money must drop to zero (in space, no-one gives you change) but you can negate this by pushing up your income, which will be triggered any time your money hits zero. A purchased ship goes into a corresponding bay, replacing the ship that was there. The old ship is deployed – the card turns 180 degrees and is tucked under your base with just the small red section showing: it won’t activate on your turn any more, but now it can be activated when your opponents roll dice instead!
So as the game continues you are deploying more and more ships in order to make as many turns as you can rewarding; hopefully picking up some kind of reward on every single turn. The ships available for purchase come in three (increasingly expensive) levels, and generally the more expensive a ship is, the more alluring the reward. Some ships can be charged when their number is rolled; and that charge can be spent to trigger a reward as well.
Finally, colony ships can be purchased at any time too. These instantly score you points, but they then do nothing apart from clog up your base taking up precious room – they can’t be deployed. As soon as someone hits 40 points the final turn will be played out, and most points wins.
Some cards allow you to target other players, but it's not a big part of the game.
You're potentially involved in every turn, but the game can have frequent lulls as players look over the ships available to purchase and decide what (or if) they want to buy.
Pretty light.
It's a game with luck, but strategy too. Go for lots of low-value ships in order to deploy regularly? Or save up for a juicy return and hope the correct roll comes up?
2-5
Players
10+
Years
10 per player
Mins
Sam says
A theme so wafer-thin it's almost not there: if you're after a game of immersive galactic adventure, this isn't it. But what Space Base offers is a rather more-ish game of dice-chucking that allows you to gain increasing control over your destiny as the game continues. The cards all function individually but some of them combine really well too, so keep an eye out for those combinations. The downside is the regular pauses as the players decide what to buy (always 18 ships available, and that's not including the colony ships) and playing with five of us, we found the game did drag a bit as a result. Two or three players is probably best.