Board Game: Chaosmos

IT'S MY BIRFDAY WE PLAY A GAME.

The Game: Chaosmos
The Publisher: Mirror Box Games
Time: Took about 120 minutes for our game, I suspect once with experienced players it'd be a little shorter
Players: Me, Michelle, Jenn

Game Play: The premise of the game is simple enough. The universe is coming to an end, and you're playing one of several different aliens who are hunting for the Ovoid, a MacGuffin that will allow whoever holds it at the end of said universe to wield ultimate power. 

Punchy punch punchy

 

The universe is composed of planets and stars (adoy), and you can move around to various planets and take control of them. Once you do, you get access to a little envelope with cards in it, and you can take cards into your hard, observing a strict hand limit of 7. One of the cards, somewhere, is the Ovoid. Every turn, the Chaos Clock ticks down (it started at 36 for us, but I think that depends on the number of players and the variants you're using). Once the clock hits zero, whoever is holding Ovoid wins. If no one is, no one wins. 

The aforementioned envelopes

Cards do various things; let you move faster, let you visit planets that are otherwise toxic to you, let you set traps on planets. They also allow for bonuses and defenses in combat, because you can (and should) attack other players. The combat system is pretty simple - you both roll two dice, and then add to the totals with cards until someone concedes, at which point the winner can banish the loser to a planet of their choice or take a card from their hand (say, the Ovoid). 

The universe!

Opinions: This game has a shitload of components and fiddly bits, but you don't actually use an undue number of them for the base game, so there's a lot of variant play and optional rules you can slot in. The base game works just fine; there's enough strategy to keep everyone guessing, and the time limit means that if you find the Ovoid early on (like Michelle did), you have to figure out what to do with it. Keep it in your hand and you're just one missed battle away from losing it, but tuck it away on a planet and you can't really keep hold of it. It's very much a game that rewards good memory and tactical thinking, which is fun because I like games like that. I'd be interested to use some of the different aliens and rules variants and see how that changes things. 

Tick, tick tick...

Keep? Yep.