Space Station Phoenix

I had had Space Station Phoenix on my radar for about a year, so I approached it with the reasonable curiosity prompted by an inexperienced, unknown designer and a company that has not accustomed us to games this heavy. And yet, it avoids the obvious pitfalls. The story of space entrepreneurs building stations to rescue aliens from collapsing planets does not claim any originality prizes — medieval nobles get cathedrals; these people get space stations — but the game is thoroughly respectable where it counts.

At its core, it combines worker placement, resource management, engine building, and area majority. Its genuinely interesting intervention in that very solid formula is that each player’s action slots are also resources. At some point, you are forced to scrap them in order to keep playing, so expanding your own action space is not simply a permanent benefit: it is also a reserve you will eventually be asked to sacrifice.

That sounds slightly suspicious when you read the rules, as though it might clog the flow or punish the player too harshly. In practice, though, the system runs beautifully. Once we got used to how the choices fit together, the game moved with almost no downtime, while the asymmetry of the station hubs and their powers creates different directions without making their true value easy to see at first glance.

Our first experience was very positive, and the final scores confirmed it in the most entertaining way: two players tied at 151, one at 150, and one at 146. I had to swallow my complaints about my supposedly weak setup, because at the last minute I discovered the power of the hub I had chosen. My main reservation is precisely this: it takes one full game with the recommended setup for everyone to understand the relative values before playing the “real” game with asymmetric hubs and spaceship drafting. For a regular group, no problem; in a more mixed group, some people may be a little put off.

My only other complaint is entirely psychological: when the others use your stuff, you get nothing. I cannot stand this communist business. Otherwise, this is a very successful, fresh mechanical take on a familiar formula, and it has already made a very good first impression on me.