Skymines

A retheming of Alexander Pfister’s Mombasa adds some space age aesthetics, new bells and whistles and an excellent solo mode. There is more than a lot to enjoy here as a solo player and while Skymines may find itself soaring at 3 and 4 player counts, if you like mid-heavy Euro games with a heap of interactivity then you’ll struggle to find much, if anything, to dislike here at any player count…

Skymines
Designer: Alexander Pfister, Viktor Kobilke.
Publisher: Deep Print Games, Pegasus Spiele
2022

How to play:

The main board…

A double sided main board – the standard side displaying the moon, the other an asteroid belt. No major differences between the two - either side will host four separate ‘companies’ which will expand gradually across the board as the game progresses. Running alongside each of those four companies will be a ‘shares’ track that players will climb, unlocking ongoing bonuses the higher they go but more crucially, earning a good chunk of end game VP as players multiply how far they have moved up each share track against how much the associated company has expanded.

The player board…

Three spaces at the bottom of your player board to place a card in at the start of the round – growing perhaps to four of five as the game progresses if you manage to unlock the ability to do so by progressing on two separate tracks on your player board - a ‘Helium-3’ track and ‘Research’ track. Both of these tracks will also gain you good chunk of VP at the end of the game depending on how far you have managed to progress on them.

The cards…

Grab your starting deck of cards which are going to be driving your actions each turn. At the start of the round you will choose all the cards you wish to place in your available slots on your action board. No deciding turn by turn what you want to do - you might be pivoting a bit certainly, but you will be planning your moves for the entire round out right from the very start.

Your starting deck will consist of:

• A research scientist: when this card is played you will be able to grab one or more ‘research’ tiles from a main display and store them on your individual player board’ Research track. Those tiles will enable you to climb that research track and the further you climb, the more end game VP you will score. Pass a certain point on the Research track and you’ll also unlock the ability to play an additional card each round.

• Energy cards of different values: Energy is going to allow you to expand a company of your choosing across the main board. Grab one of the company’s pieces from their homebase and move it to an allowed space on the board. You’ll probably grab a bonus or two depending on the space that the company expands in. Tasty. You’ll be expanding outwards from any space adjacent to your base or a space that you already control elsewhere. Some spaces might cost a little bit more energy to reach than others. You might even be tussling and ousting other companies that are already in a space that you want to be in.

• Resource Cards of different values and types (Carbon, Minerals and Titanium): You can use these to purchase new cards from a shared main display – cards that will be better versions of the ones that you started out with. Have a 2 Titanium Card and 1 Titanium Card available this round? Use them in a single turn to buy any card from the display worth 3. Or maybe buy a card worth 2 as you can also spend any remaining points to climb up a company share track. Or maybe spend all three on moving up a company’s share track. As you climb the share tracks you will unlock substantive ongoing abilities and as I mentioned earlier, moving up these tracks is going to be getting you some good VP at the end of the game if it’s linked to a company that has expanded significantly during the course of play.

• The Field Scientist: Ok, so technically you don’t start the game with a Field Scientist card. But you might want to try and get one or more pretty sharpish as they are going to let you climb up that Helium 3 track on your personal player board, reap its juicy end game VP as well as unlock the ability to play an additional card each round rather than the usual maximum of three.

So far, so ‘tracks and deck building / hand management’.

The worker placement…

You will also have a pool of workers that you can use to place on the main board. Some of the spaces will be classic ‘I got there first so I get this bonus and everyone else is now blocked’ worker placement. But some other spaces can only be occupied if you have a visible majority of XYorZ. So for example, if at any point no other player has more Energy (or Titanium, or whatever the relevant resource might be) on display in their play area then I can swoop in and claim the specific ‘energy’ worker placement spot on the board that would otherwise be locked to me if other players were trumping me with their levels of energy. This is dynamic and regularly shifts – as players take their turns and use up their cards then I can suddenly find myself winning a majority that I may not have been otherwise able to on the previous turn. So I am keenly and tactically keeping an eye on what other people are doing to see if a space suddenly opens up a tasty bonus for me.

When you can’t do anything more with what you have in front of you (cards or workers) then you pass. When all players have passed then the round ends.

At this point you move your played cards from the action slots that they have been occupying at the bottom of the board to the top of the board in equivalent resting slots - meaning that you won’t be able to use them again for a while and will have to wait until the end of the next round to grab any cards that are in one (and only one) resting slot back into your hand.

And that’s generally it: Expand a company, move up its share track, try to edge up on one or both of your Helium-3 and Research tracks, grab some new cards to make your actions more powerful / have more cards to play with. After seven rounds, be the player at the end with the most VP and take a bow.

The game also comes with a couple of optional modules that can be added – namely ‘mission’ cards (try to fulfil some goals during the game for a bonus) and ‘threat’ cards ( you’d better do this by the end of the game or there is going a chunky malus). There is also a ‘campaign’ mode of sorts. I’ll mention it briefly later.

My usual caveat: I’ve given an incredibly simplistic overview of what is most certainly a heavier game with lots of nuance and intricacies – albeit buttery smooth thanks to an excellent design and rulebook. You’ll likely be doing this anyway but take a peek at the rulebook and some play-through videos if you are wanting to get a feel for the complexities of how the many individual mechanisms intertwine.

Solo Headlines:

Well this solo mode ticks a huge amount of boxes for me. Hats off, and a big round of applause: It’s excellent.

Skymines is an interactive Euro on the heavier side of mid-heavy with more than a few moving parts so understandably at first glance my heart sank a little at the prospect of either having to operate a complex and time consuming bot, or having something a lot more reductive that lost the essence of the multiplayer games interactivity. Looking in the box and seeing that the solo mode had its own separate rulebook gave me some additional nervous worries that I was in for something fairly complex…

Be still my beating heart however as LUNA our solo opponent perfectly navigates the choppy waters of being simple to operate yet feeling like a living and breathing opponent and her rulebook is pretty short and just as superbly written as the main rulebook. Usually I might give a heavier game a two handed play to get the rules in my mind before then taking on the additional burden of a solo mode game. Here however, I felt more than comfortable diving straight in solo.

At her core LUNA is a straightforward ‘flip a card and do the one or two actions on that card’ with her turns taking seconds. As the game progresses she periodically adds in more challenging cards to the deck, incrementally ramping up her performance nicely. Some incidental iconography on her cards occasionally moves her up tracks; much like a human player she will gradually unlock the ability to play four or five cards per round; she expands companies with reasonable simplicity but with some degree of intelligence; she provides competition for worker placement spots; competition for that ‘majority’ tussle; grabs stuff from the main displays; can have her difficulty adjusted really easily to 9 different levels of challenge (number 5 feeling quite good for this particular average player). Ok, she isn’t mimicking precisely another human player – a lot of her turns see her cheating quite a bit to get where she needs to be. But the balance here is utterly superb. At the end of the game I really do feel like I have been playing against a real opponent and have had to react frequently and tactically to what they have been doing. And all with not much more than a ‘flip a card, do what it says’ simple bot.

I did worry too that that some of the interaction and bustle taking place on the main board might feel limited in the solo mode and indeed in my first game the main board was barely used. Heart sink time - is it a case of the solo game not being that good and the game needing 3 or 4 players to shine? Nope, in my second game the main board exploded. And in my third game things played a little different again. Each session felt fresh but certainly any fears that the solo experience might not be great were unfounded - there were a lot of moments of interactivity and tussling. That said, as much as I had little to no complaint about the excellent solo experience I will confess that I can absolutely see Skymines soaring with 3 - 4 players. So perhaps here we have a game for those that like to play solo and multiplayer – I think you are going to have a blast at all counts.

Solo game took around 75 minutes and feels like it ends at just the right time.

A joy, plain and simple.

General Headlines:

It’s probably unfair of me to flag up that the theme feels like it has been pasted on when the theme has literally been pasted on to the designer’s previous game, Mombasa. That said, while there has been a reasonably good attempt here at giving Skymines a feeling of outer space / sci-fi, things do feel more or less like a collection of intertwining mechanisms that happen incidentally to have a space theme. This isn’t like when I took one look at Lacrimosa, saw the Mozart theme and thought ‘oh, hello - now you have my attention’ before I even knew how it played. That isn’t a criticism and theme is of course always subjective. And in reality I don’t play a Pfister game for the theme in the first instance - I play a Pfister game because I know 100% the mechanisms are going to be many, polished, heavy, satisfying and all complementing each other excellently. Skymines (co-designed with Viktor Kobilke) is a genuinely great game because of how it plays and not because of what it’s necessarily about - hence why the theme has probably been so seamlessly interchangeable between Mombasa and Skymines. But there is enough of a decent façade of mining the moon and space style type iconography and the like to keep me engaged thematically I suppose. Make no mistake however - it’s the gameplay that we are primarily here on The Moon for.

The other thing that you know you are going to be getting when you bring a Pfister to the table is that cards will be driving the gameplay. Skymines is no different and if you have previously played Pfister’s Blackout Hong Kong (and you really should if you are a solo player as it particularly shines solo) then you will be in very familiar territory with how the card play works here – mapping out all of your turns at the start of the round, seeing the cards you use in a round go into a resting area where you have to make tough decision on where they rest, which other cards they will rest with, whether to grab a stack of resting cards back quickly or let them build up in to a tasty pile for a mammoth round later in the game. Selling cards, gaining new powerful cards, trying to make cards combo. Cards, Cards, Cards. This is not a game where you place one card down that lets you simply take an action. Every element of the card play is brain burning – what card to play, what card it might go well with, when to play it, when not to play, where to put it when you have played it, when to pull it back into your hand, when to leave it resting for a while longer, whether to purchase new cards. It’s a game of itself.

The Helium-3 and Research tracks that you have on your player board are the only real areas where there is no particular interactivity in an otherwise highly interactive game (more on that interactivity shortly). Your personal Research track is a mind melting mini game which sees you needing to collect tiles which will have particular symbols on them. In order to move up the track you are only able to move up as far as you have tiles collected but crucially you can also only move up the Research track if you can match the symbols on the tiles with ones displayed on the cards you currently have in play for the round. So I might have filled my track up with swathes of tiles that hypothetically let me climb my track, but if I haven’t given thought to the symbols on these tiles, the order that I am placing in them in, whether the cards I am playing in my hand match the symbols etc then I’m going to be going nowhere fast. It’s an excellent little solitaire puzzle slap bang in the middle of an interactive game with lots of things going on. And I really like this balance in Skymines between focusing solely on what I am doing but also what the other players (in this case my solo opponent, LUNA) are doing.

And yes, there is a lot of that interactivity throughout the game – not just the worker placement element, keeping one eye on who is winning those ‘majority’ battles, racing to be first to get a card or tile that you have your eye on, seeing someone place their company on a spot that you had your eye on etc. All of those things I’ve seen before in other Euros. Skymines has all of that but also something really smart – the ability to try and piggyback on the successes of other players. You see, if my opponent is expanding a company significantly and getting shares in that company then you know what, I think I might need to invest in that company too and reap some of the benefits from their hard work. Players that are focussed solely on their own game, on expanding their own companies, on getting their own shares – those players are going to lose. The players that are seeing what everyone else is building and jumping on their successes – those players are playing the smart game. And this element also adds in a lot of tactical pivots – “oh wait, I was going to do something else but now that I can see you focussing on that other thing. I might do that as well then”. You will be able to specialise on a particular strategic goal or two but you really need to be focused on everything going on everywhere and be responsive to what other people are doing.

Skymines also feels like it constantly gives bonuses – you’ll rarely if ever be taking a turn or making a move that doesn’t reward you with something that you can usefully use – points, moves up a track, accessing new cards, expanding your companies, delicious new choices opening up. And those rewards and bonuses feel different every game due to the highly variable set up. Each of the four main share tracks on the board come with different (significant) abilities that can be triggered as you reach certain heights, are double sided, and can be moved around game to game. The double sided board doesn’t bring about a huge new ruleset – just some very minor tweaks that offer a bit of change, different optional Mission and Threat cards give different overarching strategic objectives each game. You may be largely ‘doing the same stuff’ game to game but how you approach the task at hand feels totally different each time.

While packaged as coming with a campaign I’d temper your expectations on this one if you were expecting something along the lines of the splendid card based campaign from the designers other game Maracaibo. The campaign in Skymines I would say is more just a simplistic tutorial of sorts to guide you through the different modules incrementally – stuff like “now play with the other side of the mainboard” or “now add in a threat card”. I can see a lot of players skipping this altogether and just exploring everything at their leisure. But for those that need a little more handholding, the tutorial is there I suppose…

End game scoring is very ‘mathsy’ – you aren’t going to be looking down on a single VP counter to see who has won at a glance. Paladins of the West Kingdom fans will be in safe territory here as they get the calculators out to score multiple tracks and areas to figure out who has won – and it certainly does make for a tense finish which I enjoyed.

At a glance:

+ A superb solo mode that manages to remain simple in a game that has many moving parts

+ Gameplay that balances both interactive and solitaire elements as well as tactical and strategic decision making

+ A heavier game, but one that feels intuitive by design and as the result of an excellent rulebook

+ Hand management and card play generally is superb

+ Every turn feels rewarding

+/- If you like tracks you will be happy. If you don’t, this might not be the game for you

+/- Theme is pretty nondescript but to be honest, it’s the mechanics that are shining here

+/- Might well be at its best at 3 or 4 players but there is a whole lot of game here at 1p and 2p

- 'Campaign' is an anticlimax

- A minor gripe about the choice of too similar colours for some of the resources used in the game

Final Score:

8.5 out of 10 (I’d give a 9 out 10 for gameplay alone, bringing the score down a fraction as I didn’t feel fully immersed in the theme). Reviewed after 7 plays.