Among The Stars is a derivative and highly repetitive card drafting game about building space stations. Players pass “Location” cards around the table and add them to their personal tableaus by spending “Credits” and “Energy Cubes”, which scores them points and activates abilities (which usually score more points). There are variable player powers and shared objectives to vie over for points as well, but they’re mostly inconsequential. The vast majority of player scores comes from the location cards. The game is played over four essentially identical rounds, and the player with the highest score after that wins. This exceedingly brief summary is about as far as I’m going to go into the overall structure and rules of the game, aside from some particulars which I’ll be getting to in a moment, as the focus of this review will be comparing Among The Stars to its two most obvious tabletop relatives: Suburbia and 7 Wonders. Spoiler alert: they are both far superior games.
The set-up rules for Among The Stars begin with an immediate red flag: “The game can be played in two modes: Aggressive and Non-Aggressive.” Is it so much to ask designers to design their games instead of leaving it the players? I’m all for optional variants and other methods of extending the longevity of a game that may otherwise exhaust itself after a few too many plays, but to place this choice front and center in your game’s set-up betrays a serious lack of confidence in the appeal of your game. Maybe it’s just me. Maybe I’m just a sensitive Sam over here. Anyway, the next sentence in the rulebook specifies that the core game is the non-aggressive mode, so I suppose I should shut up now and get on to actual points.
Let’s start with something relatively frivolous: Among The Stars is an eyesore. Its graphic design is cluttered and unattractive, its table presence is sprawling and sloppy, and its art is generic and lifeless (how this game has a reputation for having excellent art is beyond me, it looks like directionless concept work for a shelved sci-fi video game). To say I don’t like looking at this game sounds somewhat ridiculous, but it’s actually true. It makes my eyes tired. Suburbia‘s art is extremely minimal for a reason. 7 Wonders has cards designed to allow you to cascade them without covering up pertinent information for the future. These are visual considerations to reduce cognitive load without sacrificing mechanical depth, and this stuff matters. If by some miracle this game ever gets the budget for a production overhaul, there is a ton of work that needs to be done.
If you don’t care about the visual experience of tabletop games, don’t worry. The social experience of Among The Stars is severely lacking as well. Neither 7 Wonders or Suburbia are particularly social games, granted, but they definitely have a lot more going on than this. 7 Wonders has military and trading systems that reward you for keeping an eye on your neighbors’ tableaus, and Suburbia has persisting tile interactions that can affect all players’ future tile placements. Among The Stars has shallow location card abilities that either have you making an immediate one-time comparison with other players’ space stations, or they don’t come into effect at all until the end of the game. This makes the tableau building aspect of the game quite dull, because there are no shared systems for the players’ decisions to affect. In addition, to take 7 Wonders-esque card drafting — a system that’s already prone to an overly heads down social element — and add Suburbia-esque spatial positioning mechanics is a premium example of poor design intuition. You see, certain locations can only be placed — or have abilities that only activate — if placed within certain proximities of other locations. It’s simple enough, sure, but in practice all it does is make it even harder to care about what your opponents are doing, because you’re too busy fiddling with your own tableau. Almost every turn one player will lag behind the others as they try to figure out the best position for their card, which holds up the game and defeats the entire purpose of a simultaneous card drafting system in the process.
A smaller, yet just as notable issue with the game is its economy. It’s very, very apparent that the designer of Among The Stars could not figure out a way to balance an active, mutable supply of wealth and resources, so opted instead to simply hand players 10 credits at the beginning of each round through no work of their own. A fixed cash flow in a modern tableau builder is a borderline unacceptable mechanism. Comparing this pre-determined wealth injection to the resource management of 7 Wonders or income system of Suburbia yields another critical failure by comparison.
The final point I’d like to address is the game’s narrative. It has none. You deal cards from the same shuffled deck all four rounds, so there is no narrative arc to the game at all. It may not seem like it, but this is a HUGE deal. Imagine 7 Wonders without the three separate decks, or Suburbia without the separate tile stacks. The experiences of both games would crumble. This cannot be overstated. Without any guidance to the order cards come out, Among The Stars dooms itself to total monotony. All four rounds feel exactly alike, as does practically every turn. Play a card, get some points. Play a card, get some points. Play a card, get some points. 7 Wonders doesn’t burden you with score-tracking until the end (smart move), and Suburbia‘s mid-game scoring is way more interesting because it directly affects your decision space in a (relatively) thematic way. Among The Stars‘ cadence is unflinchingly flat and unexciting.
Let me be perfectly clear in saying that I don’t believe Among The Stars makes a single compelling argument for playing it over similar, better titles. While I fully appreciate that the “little from Column A, little from Column B” approach to game design has resulted in some pretty spectacular creations over the years, this is far from one of them. The ultimate key to that approach is to have a thematic and mechanical vision to unite those borrowed systems under, which Among The Stars very distinctly lacks. The end result of this is a design that is little more than a junk pile of decontextualized and haphazardly intertwined subsystems that all work much better in the games they were taken from than they do here.
Among The Stars gets a rating of TWO out of FIVE, indicating it is NOT RECOMMENDED.