Recently SpaceCorp becomes one of my favorite space-themed games. I explicitly do not write 4X game, as while we have tons of Explore & Expand, some Exploit, there is no Exterminate in that title. That is why this is so great family game, even for the pretty young ones. And believe me, you can even perform a great feat of convincing your wife from time to time to try space / alien based game!

Some of my articles regarding SpaceCorp:
Space Corp - UNBOXING
SpaceCorp - REVIEW
SpaceCorp – Solo Mode
SpaceCorp as a family boardgame

The Game

Couple of words about the title – SpaceCorp: 2025-2300 AD is a board game in which one to four players explore and develop outer space over three eras. We control the enterprises – located on Earth – through three epochs:

  • Mariners – covers exploration and development out to Mars.
  • Planeteers – focuses on the whole Solar System
  • Starfarers – we send missions to nearby star systems in order to establish interstellar colonies.

There are tons of actions players can take and each era is played on the different board. What is more, the game is based on Ejner Fulsang’s SpaceCorp book, the first of the Galactican Series.

The session report

We were four players divided in three teams. Magda played with Kuba (5 years) as yellow, Natan (7 years) decided to lead his own corporation – of course with assistance from parents – and chosen green while I was in charge of blue corporation.

Mariners Era

Warm-up Marineers era (click to enlarge)

There are some voices that Marineers Era is redundant in Spacecorp. I disagree. Yes, the amount of Victory points to get is much smaller compared to the other Eras; still, this is superb intro to the game when you had a longer pause from the last session. That also worked great with the boys and Magda – and allowed them again to quickly grasp the mechanics and be ready for more complex exploration later on.

Planeteers Era

Boys love the Solar System exploration and managed to already learn names of most of the planets plus some moons!
Victory Points are still tight
Natan and me are “first beyond”
(click to enlarge)

With the Planeteers Era the Spacecorp starts to shine. The are many more choices, area to explore is broader, the award tiles very intriguing. We start also to discover Adaptation / Breakthrough tiles. The amount of VPs also grows exponentially – so far it is pretty close in our game.

Starfarers Era

With some support from “dad” the whole family coped pretty well with most complicated Era – Starfarers. A lot of new lands were colonized, many star systems explored.
But the greatest thrill for Kuba and Nathan is always looking for aliens. Boy, how they love it! Unfortunately, this time Kuba and mom encountered Phobes, not having security technology…
In the meantime, Nathan heavily invested in Adaptations and Breakthroughs. To be honest, I never seen anybody amassing so many of them!
The end was very exciting. The scores pretty high and the winner – Natan – decided by 2 points! (click to enlarge)

If you look at the above scores (feel free to click on image to enlarge) you would see that any claim that first era is unnecessary is not valid. The difference between first two places is only 2 VPs, with me in the distant third place (should focus more on my corporation rather then assisting every one else – of course, joking 🙂 )

Summary

Spacecorp never fails to amuse me – how a great game it is. The most important thing is that you can play it with your family / kids and use for educational purposes but also with the advanced boardgamers who optimize each move.

When Kuba or Nathan explore the system you can see great joy and fascination each time they are finding something new. And when it is Alien – the whole table rejoices 🙂 It is such a fun to see them being more and more attached to the board-gaming hobby – an investment which daddy hopes will pay-off in the future!

PS. I can’t wait for the expansion which I of course already supported on P500. Even more fun to come!