Apogee

Apogee looks, from a distance, like a sensible pick for anyone wanting a space race. Each player runs a space programme, money is tight, and the promise is a race towards a mission. The promise has a better trajectory than the game.

Each round, you manage your team of engineers and assign them work. The flow is understandable, and none of the mechanisms is inherently peculiar: build your programme, find the necessary means, and race the others towards launch.

Player interaction is mostly that race and the pressure of limited resources, rather than any particularly lively confrontation. In practice, though, the game becomes an hour of everybody doing things until somebody draws the winning card. Then you applaud.

That is where the melon splits. Some engines appear only twice in the entire deck, so you may simply never be able to launch anything over a long distance. That is not tight design; it is design waving at you from the next room. Even Exploding Kittens has more depth.

What irritates most is that the production seems to have its priorities backwards. You get dice, patches and coasters, while the essential board showing rocket mass-to-thrust ratios looks as though it was hurried through an inkjet printer after someone remembered it at the end. It is lavishly packed. So is a box of useless cables.

Apogee contains enough stuff to make you think you bought a space game, but not enough game to justify the stuff. Hard pass.