Game Overview

I’m starting off my Board Game Arena spotlight series with a well-known title, Space Base. This is a game I have looked at so many times in stores, and have always put back. The components of the game are sprawling and have a vibrant – I would say garish – color palette that has always turned me off a bit. The base game also only plays five, and for better or worse my gaming group almost always has six or more.

The core gameplay mechanic of Space Base is that two dice are rolled on every player’s turn, and you may produce a variety of resource types based on the numbers rolled. You can choose rewards based on the total of the dice or the two individual face values, whichever is most beneficial for you. The feel of the game is very similar to Catan, except there’s no shared board. Instead there are individual player boards with spaces labeled 1 through 12, where you assign cards you purchase from three rivers and place into those slots based on their die value shown. There are also one time victory point cards that can be purchased from a static row.

There are three resource types in the game. Credits are your basic purchase resource and are used to buy cards. Income becomes a floor for your credits. When you buy a card, you spend all of your credits, regardless of how much the card costs, and then your credit total is reset to your current income value. This was a rules nuance I didn’t realize in my first few playthroughs, and it was very punishing for me as I overspent often and wasted credits. Finally, there are victory points, which contribute to winning the game.

The first player to reach 40 victory points triggers the end of the game, with all players getting an equal number of turns. The player with the most victory points at the end of the last round wins.

General Impressions

Space Base is a quick to play, easy to learn casual game. It’s satisfying to build your engine and see your rewards flow in based on the common dice rolls. The lesser rolled dice results tend to be high reward cards, so those can lead to dramatic game changing moments if they roll at the right times. Obviously being dice based, there’s a heavy luck element to the game, and the gameplay is around managing to the statistics of the dice and making use of dice adjusting abilities as possible.

In the 10 games of Space Base I have played so far, the scoring has always followed an exponential growth pattern for victory point accumulation. Point totals grow slowly at first, and just as your production engine really starts to take off, the game is over in just a few turns. This seems to be a common design decision, which is fine, but in such a short game it can leave me feeling a little unfulfilled in the end. I was just getting started!

There are some cards that have direct player interaction, such as causing other players to lose victory points, but as with everything in the game those are dependent on specific numbers being rolled to activate them. There are rivers of cards to buy, but it’s hard to anticipate what your opponents may want or be able to buy, so it seems generally best to just focus on what is best for you at the time, rather than playing for denial. This leads to the game feeling largely like a single player game. Human opponents could easily be replaced with automata, and the play experience would be identical.

BGA Particulars

The gameplay of Space Base is pretty smooth in the BGA interface. There’s not so much going on with this game that I would consider the digital version a significant improvement over a physical copy experience. There are some nice optional settings to streamline things even further digitally. You can choose to have the game scripting auto-select the best result of a dice roll, which really speeds things along without having to inanely click to confirm results.

The game definitely plays best on desktop to be able to read the cards easily and have enough real estate to assess all of your options. Even on desktop, it’s difficult to keep track of what your opponents are doing in their own play areas. As mentioned above, this is not hugely pivotal to playing the game anyway.

One big downside of playing digitally is that you don’t get the tactile satisfaction of chucking dice around.

Fun Factor

Even though I have some frustrations with the game, it’s definitely fun to throw some dice and see what happens, and to grow your engine to consistently produce. Space Base is a great quick play, which could serve well as a palate cleanser game in between heavier plays, or as an endcap game to close out a game night. The strategy elements of the game are light, so it should be family friendly and fun for all.

I will definitely be revisiting Space Base often on BGA when I have 20 minutes or so to fill.

Next Up

The next game I’ll be targeting for a BGA spotlight post is Lost Ruins of Arnak. This is another game I’ve come close to purchasing a few times, so I’m excited to get to play it!