SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence

SETI was the Czech flagship we put on the table instead of Black Forest—we saved Uwe for a day when we would be more rested, because that is a different breed of management. My first impression of SETI was very positive: a huge, generous euro, pleasant to play and full of clever mechanisms, with only a slight resemblance to La Granja. It is one of those games that lays out many paths in front of you and makes you want to come back to try more of them.

At its core, the game offers multiple victory paths and different action choices, with income cards that need to slot properly into your plan. Telescopes can become a central route to victory, while planets are important targets that can be lost when other players perform double scans. The flow is about building your economy and options so that your later actions pay off more and more.

The interaction is not merely decorative, because competition for planets and the timing of scans can leave someone shut out. The problem is that, if players do not maintain balance in the income cards, this nicely constructed system can go wrong very quickly: whoever gains an income lead can spam telescopes and farm away on their own. At that point, the rest of the table is not so much playing against them as watching their economic superiority multiply. Wonderful space exploration, provided the game does not cast you as an extra.

In the first play, that generosity looked more like a virtue. Yet SETI also belongs to that modern category of games where nobody must be made too uncomfortable: VP and extended actions rain down, even though the game does not seem to need them. The final round in particular feels unnecessary, adding roughly 40–60 minutes without any meaningful way to halt the leading player—unless everyone has done so badly that they have not even crossed 70 points to close the milestones.

The replay, confirmed by another similar experience, brought us back down to earth. The mechanisms remain very good, but the game felt rather scripted and far too willing to turn an early lead into a snowball to the death. In a euro with little or no luck, score gaps where one player finishes with double or triple everyone else's score are not an achievement; they are a warning light. I do not think it is a bad game, but under the wrong conditions it can become an NPE, especially when you keep losing planets to double scans and spend half the game watching somebody else optimize their personal VP farm.

There is a reason you will find rave reviews: SETI is pleasant, rich, and highly replayable. For me, though, the initial certainty has turned into caution. I want a big euro to reward good play, not hand the first player who connects their income cards correctly a permit to keep playing alone until the end.

Updated session

We returned with the expansion, which adds more cards, additional aliens, and an accelerated asymmetric setup in a Terraforming Mars style. The new aliens we tried were hit and miss. The accelerated setup is well designed on paper, but in our game it did exactly what I already feared from the base game: one player took a lead and held it comfortably throughout, while the rest of us fought to remain in the game. The base game was already complete enough; you can very comfortably ignore the expansion.