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is a cooperative party game where you listen to your friends performing weird sounds
as they try to make you guess all sorts of concepts...
all at the same time!
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Title: Designer: Illustration:
Publisher: Players: Age: Duration: Price:
Rocketmen
Martin Wallace Bartłomiej Jedrzejewski, Jakub Fajtanowski, Miłosz Wojtasik Phalanx Games
1 – 4
about 14+ years
about 60 minutes about 30 Euros
Reviewer Playing appeal
Alan How 7
aborting option does at least provide a way out when the success cards that you draw are really low.
Whether this push your luck aspect of the game appeals, it does provide un- certainty and occasionally it works and sometimes it doesn’t. You can mitigate this significantly by gaining achievement tokens which come from earlier successful missions and provide boosts to your mis- sion by moving the token further along the track before you draw cards. This encourages you to make smaller leaps in missions so that these achievement tokens gradually increase the odds for future successful missions. The cards can also help with hand size, cash values or science tokens which help with specific mission types. You’ll need these in order to move the odds of a mission success in your favor but when you go for it and when you keep adding advantages, is part of your own risk/reward strategy.
Even if you are behind you can succeed at a difficult mission and this joy helps to bring laughter and despair to the play- ers in the game in equal measure. I have found the fun element in this game to be far higher than other games by this designer and it seems to fit the uncer- tainty of space missions at least from a
layman‘s viewpoint. The game is easy to pick up and the process of get cards/ launch missions/gain victory points is pretty intuitive.
I have enjoyed my games of Rocketmen and as a 60 minute introductory game for an evening session it does not outstay its welcome. The deck building aspect is simple so it could also serve as a way to introduce newer players to this style of
game. The components are all fine and I liked the helpful player guides that summarize the game. I have the min- iature sets which are used to mark success in each of the missions. These are completely unnec- essary to gain full enjoyment from the game, but do add a physical presence to your mission achievements. In terms of replayability, I think this is likely to be the game’s big- gest problem. The processes are the same each game and there is far less variety than you might have ex- pected from a Martin Wallace design. But against this is the ease of entry and rules that are intuitive, so the answer to my earlier question is yes, if you like a short game with potential for highs and lows. I just wish I could play face to face to see
the expressions on my friends faces.