Last Light (7p)
Well this was neat! 4X space game with 7 players in around 3 hours (and maybe half of that if you know what you’re doing, by the looks of BGG… :).
Table presence is ridiculous… none of those planets need to be three-dimensional models, but they are and it sure looks pretty! Set-up is a minor faff (the different planet types each go in particular places according to the set-up map being used, with all those little half-circle tokens on the bases allocated), but not too bad.
And those circular parts of the board? That’s because the planets are in motion! At the end of each turn the large ring rotates 45° (carrying the inner ring with it), and the inner ring rotates a further 90° for a total of 135°). The players all start on those smaller discs amongst the “distant planets” (which don’t move), but once ships are sent into the inner circle, they’re going to be interacting with players on the other side of the board.
Planets have bonuses for the first player to discover them (so there’s an initial rush to move around the system), and persistent resources to mine if you build an extractor there (which other players may destroy).
Ships come in three sizes, and of course there are technologies to research and build to upgrade your ships, or to obtain other benefits (some permanent, others single-use).
It plays as quickly as it does at a high player-count because the majority of action types can be done simultaneously by everyone who chose that action. Only the move-and-attack action is in a strict player order.
And that space in the very centre? You just flat-out get points for every ship of yours in that space at the end of a round. (So cue the carnage, as players try their luck at that.) On which note, every player has a unique ability (you choose between two at the start), and I recall one of them being that you always go last, regardless of player order, for the move-and-attack action :).
Everyone has the same set of action cards which they can play once per turn, but everyone rapidly gets out of sync with one another. Playing your “refresh” card lets you get your other cards back so you can play them again. You can’t get your “refresh” card back until the round ends, though, which happens once all players have played their refresh card. And when the round ends, it’s only your refresh card that you take back – so if you refreshed early and re-played one or more cards before the round ended, you don’t get those other cards back (until the next time you refresh). However various bonuses and abilities can enable you to take a card back, meaning that some players might get more turns in a given round than others, de-synchronising things even further.
So many interesting things going on here… I thoroughly enjoyed it.
