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Review. Rocketmen
Lucky Mission in Space
Martin Wallace is one of my favorite designers so when a new game of his is announced I am always interested. I don’t find every game of his excellent, but he has a knack of designing games with good systems that work with the story behind the game. This game was launched
via Kickstarter in January 2020 and expected in October 2020 which is a pretty quick turnaround for a Kickstarter. It arrived about 6 months later, which in my experience is a normal affair, but considering the COVID situation and worldwide disruption, wasn’t too bad. But was the game worth the wait?
By ALAN HOW
The game is set in space as you can deduce from the title. It’s a deck building game where players are financiers who earn victory points for fulfilling missions with spacecraft sent to Earth orbit, the Moon and Mars (in in- creasing difficulty).
In order to succeed at a mission two re- quirements must be met: the rocket token must reach a target number of spaces on the mission track and the right mission card is played. Missions have different lo- cations for each destination, but each fi- nancier can only succeed at each location once. In order to achieve this each play- er is generating a mix of cards on their launch pad that hopefully will grant them success. I say hopefully because each des- tination allows a number of draws from a mission success deck that includes cards of different values. These range from 0 to 4 movement points along the mission track, with an average value of just less than 2 points.
You need to know this as your mission needs 8 or 10 or 13 movement points to succeed and you have 3, 4 or 5 card draws. Clearly the odds are against you, but you can improve your chances by playing the appropriate engine card while achievement tokens can add fur- ther boosts.
Gathering these resources is part of the deck building element of the game. There is an array of cards to choose from with different dollar costs and your hand of cards can be used as their cash val- ue to acquire cards. So the game initial- ly is about improving your deck of cards and assembling a set good enough to launch missions. These start at the eas-
ier end as you can’t jump too far ahead. Com- peting against you are the other players of course, who might buy cards you need (too bad), and achieve missions faster than you. Each mission type can be ful- filled by multiple
players, but those who do so earlier re- ceive more victory points. As the game end is triggered when a threshold of points is met by one player, there is this indirect competition for points. Seeing how other players are developing their decks you can see whether they are di- rectly competing for a mission or not.
The exciting part of the game is turn- ing over the mission success cards. As these are reshuffled for each mission you know the overall odds of success, but they can vary significantly as you turn over the success cards. If you reach the required score your reward is the related victory points, but often (too often when I’m playing!) the last card you turn over can be the difference between success and failure. If you are in doubt or sometimes you are clear that certain failure is the outcome, you can abort a mission, which allows you to save a good card back to the launchpad, or of course you can press on and hope. Failure means all the cards that you played as part of the mission are discarded and you’ll have to assemble a new set of cards on a future turn. As there is only one mission attempt allowed each turn, this is a tricky decision sometimes. Of course you can have a terrible draw and you might need to abort, so this
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Photos: Becker, Phalanx Games