I had pre-ordered, through Kickstarter, a game called Alien Frontiers. It showed up Thursday and I was able to play it Thursday night.
I wanted AF because I had heard early on that it was a scifi mix of Kingsburg and To Court the King. I like rolling dice and I like scifi and it seemed cool to "kick off" the publishing of the game so I pledged. I had yet to play Kingsburg and TCtK is a fun diversion I play with my family from time-to-time, so I figured it was worth a shot.
Since then I had played Kingsburg a couple of times (without expansion) and thought it ran a little long. I wasn't as overly impressed as I thought I would be.
What's nice about AF is that it's pretty easy to learn and quick to play. I had read through the rules before meeting up with my weekly game group and after about 10 minutes of running through the board and what you could do, we started rolling.
The game is resource management and area control. You are trying to gather resources to build colony hubs that you then launch onto the planet that is depicted on the middle of the board. Also depicted on the board are various space stations where you dock your ships and receive a power or benefit.
Your fleet of ships is represented by dice. Each die is a ship. So you roll on your turn and then place your dice (ala Kingsburg) at various space stations to gather resources, mess with opponents, find alien tech, and prepare colonies for launch. There is no game round per se, as you leave your ships where you dock them until your next turn, when you pick them up and roll again. This means you can lock other players out of areas and vice versa.
When you finally launch a colony, you choose any area on the planet (it is split up into sections) and if you control that area (have more colonies than anyone else in that specific area), you gain a special power and hold onto that power until someone ties you for number of colonies.
The alien tech is in the form of cards and that's where the To Court the King comparisons come in. The tech lets you spend resources to alter your die rolls (either through rerolls or changing the face of the pips), remove other player's ships from orbital stations, gain extra resources, etc.
A really appealing aspect of the game is how even a poor roll can net you something. There is a colonist hub where you are prepping a colony for launch, and even if you can't use some of the more powerful orbital stations (that require doubles, triples, straights, or high die values), you can allocate ships to move your colony along the prep track. So I never felt like I had a wasted turn.
The game ends when a player places his or her last colony on the planet. The VP track is a separate board and it's malleable in that your points increase and decrease as players vie for territories. The game gives you 3 ways to place colonies via orbital stations so there are a bunch of ways to get colonies set up.
Our first game took maybe a little over the 90 minute play time listed on the box and that was with a rule review and a few rule checks during the game. I see this as being in the sweet spot of 60 to 90 minutes when people know how to play.
So the good news is my "gamble" so far has paid off. Obviously we'll have to see how it holds up under repeated play, but opinions were favorable as we put the game away.
The bad news is because it was a self-published game, they are already sold out. However, the buzz has been positive on the Geek and the reviews popping up have matched the buzz, so the designer and publisher are already looking into finance options for a second print run.
