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Space Planets

Dice working as a sensor

With their space ships players explore far-away galaxies and planets and use sensors. Each player chooses a card for his space ship and is given four fuel crystals. All planet cards are shuffled and stacked face down; the top nine cards are laid out in a grid of 3x3 cards.

The die represents the sensor – in your turn you roll it from outside the grid in a way that it touches as valuable a planet card as possible. When the die has stopped moving and it then touches one of the planet cards, you have successfully explored it with the die for a sensor. You can now pay the crystals indicated by the die, take the planet card and set it down. All planet cards but the Black Hole card show a special effect: some while in the grid – +1 crystal to the roll; some openly with a player - all pay +1 to the roll; some have instant effects – gain one or two crystal or repeat a roll; after use of the effect cards are turned over. Instead of paying for a card and taking the card you can leave the card in place and take as many fuel crystals from stock as the die result indicates. If you explore the Black Hole, you must end your turn, pay nothing and get nothing. The Black Hole is taken out of play. For a card that is removed from the grid you place a new one from the stack. If someone has collected five planets, all other players have one more turn and then you win with most stars on your planets.

Space Planets is a very nice, imaginative and well-made mix of dice rolling and dexterity; the story fits the mechanism exceedingly well, as do the components; space ships and planet cards are very cutely illustrated.

Players: 2-4

Age: 6+

Time: 15+

Designer: Benjamin Schwer

Artist: Mirco Brüchler

Price: ca. 9 Euro

Publisher: Haba 2015

Web: www.haba.de

Genre: Dice, dexterity

Users: For children

Version: multi

Rules: de en es fr it nl

In-game text: no

Comments:

Very clever use of dice

Attractive components

Simple rules

A bit of tactic is possible

Compares to:

Target and other dice rolls with destinations

Other editions:

Currently none

Chance (pink): 3

Tactic (turquoise): 1

Strategy (blue): 0

Creativity (dark blue): 0

Knowledge (yellow): 0

Memory (orange): 0

Communication (red): 0

Interaction (brown): 0

Dexterity (green): 3

Action (dark green): 1