Apogee

Apogee landed for me on the wrong side of a Kickstarter bet. It came out around the same time as Wallace's Rocketmen and, because the two looked broadly similar, I decided to try my luck. But roulette has a sense of humour: you keep betting on red and black keeps coming up. If Apogee is on your shelf, I'm afraid you lost too.

Thematically, it is exactly what you expect: everyone runs a space programme, tries to cope with tight money, and races the others to complete their mission. Each player manages a team of engineers and assigns them actions every round. The flow, at least on the surface, is perfectly fine.

The problem is that this flow does not seem to lead anywhere interesting. In practice, the game has us doing things for roughly an hour until someone draws the winning card. Then, I suppose, we applaud. The interaction of the racing game does not build tension or meaningful decisions; it simply waits for the finish line to appear from the deck. Even Exploding Kittens felt deeper to me.

And as if that were not enough, there are choices that look either careless or as though nobody ever played the game enough themselves. Some engines appear only twice in the entire deck, meaning you effectively cannot launch anything over a long distance. Meanwhile, the main board with the rockets' mass-to-thrust ratios looks as if it was printed at the last minute on an inkjet because somebody forgot it, while the box contains dice, patches, and coasters by the ton. Clearly, the coasters were the crucial priority. So for me: hard pass, block, unfriend.