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Skymines Review

  • ryanlott
  • Oct 24, 2022
  • 3 min read

October is a month of firsts from big designers for me. First it was Feld, now it's Pfister.


Skymines from Pegasus Spiele puts players in the shoes of investors trying to accumulate the most wealth from mining the moon (or asteroids) for their sweet, sweet resources. Each round, players will fill their "on" slots with cards from their hands. Then they'll do whatever the cards played do. This can be simply to purchase better cards to play in their hands using resources, spend energy for outposts to gain research points to spend for big points at the end of the game, or play field scientists to advance your research tracks or move along one of the investment tracks. There's also some worker placement spots for additional bonuses that you can play. When you are forced to pass, you'll slot each of your played cards into one of the silos above your board and take one of the stacks back into your hand. At the start of the game you only have access to 3 of your 5 card slots. As you move your markers across your player board you'll get access to the other two when you pass set points. The game will last for 7 rounds and the player that has the most points wins.


The board itself is double sided with a moon side and an asteroid side. The key difference between the two is that the asteroid side requires additional planning when attempting to place outposts. You'll need to place a ship on the board as well connecting to the outposts. You can also include threat cards or mission cards to add in multiple replay types. At the time of writing this, I haven't had a chance to try those out quite yet.


The Good: Skymines is a game that flows really nicely. When you first set it up and see everything that's going on with the board you're going to feel overwhelmed but honestly, it's not nearly as heavy as it seems. You have a lot of choices to make but the overall amount of actions is pretty minimal. The key is to be as efficient as possible and clever with your cards played. I love that there are additional modules included to make the game as advanced as you need it to be. It's great to be able to have so many options.


The Okay: The theme is just okay, it's not one that I personally felt any real attachment to. It works for the game just fine though and I completely understand the need to remake a game like Mombasa but mining space rocks for crypto does nothing for me at the end of the day.


The Not So Good: I can't really think of anything that I outright didn't like in this game. If I'm going to be picky here, I guess I would say that I wasn't necessarily in love with the tuck boxes as a whole. It's a unique solution for sure but it doesn't really work with repacking the game and they felt a bit flimsy. I appreciate the effort but I feel like I would have preferred bags or a divided insert. Obviously, this has zero effect on the gameplay but it's my review and I'm allowed to complain about whatever I want.


Final Thoughts: I loved Skymines. The action selection method is unique and there's a lot of tension during your turns to make sure that you're making the most of each one. For a game that looks like this, you'll expect it to be kind of weird and finicky but it's not. At all. That's all you can ask for. Especially if you need to teach it to someone. The theme itself is a meh at best but the gameplay more than makes up for it. If this catches on like Mombasa did I can absolutely see it cracking the top 100 on Board Game Geek.


Thanks to Pegasus North America for providing me with a review copy.

 
 
 

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