The rotating central board, the solar system actually turns as certain player actions trigger it, is the one thing here I hadn’t seen before, and it’s a nice piece of physical design, planets drifting into and out of reach depending on what everyone else has been doing. Somebody described the rest of the game as a “greatest hits album” of modern Euro mechanics, and I can’t argue with that assessment even though I mean it more fondly than they probably did. Multi-use cards, an action selection engine, a point salad scoring sheet at the end, all of it competently assembled, none of it new.

Teaching it isn’t the hard part, the individual actions are simple enough that a first-time player understood their options within twenty minutes. Where it drags is turn five and six, once you’ve scanned the accessible moons and unlocked the visible alien tracks, the last stretch starts feeling like working down a checklist of things you haven’t gotten around to yet rather than making meaningfully new decisions. One of my group put it as the game outstaying its welcome by about one round, and I agree, four turns probably would have been tighter than five.

I want to flag the two player scanning problem specifically because it bit us directly: the amount of data you need to complete a sector doesn’t scale down for fewer players, so a two or three player game makes finishing sectors noticeably harder than it should be relative to the four player version, which feels like an oversight rather than a design choice. If you’re mostly playing at two, go in knowing that.

Three stars. The theme is genuinely lovely, the component quality is excellent, and the combo of multi-use cards is legitimately crunchy in a satisfying way for the first four rounds. But this is very much a well made tour through Euro mechanics you’ve probably already played somewhere better, and the rotating board is the only thing here that made me sit up and take real notice.