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Tag: Among The Stars

** Among The Stars (2012) – Vangelis Bagiartakis

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…