Space Base

30th June 2021

It's a Wednesday and we're round Simon's for some gaming.

Star Trekkin' across the universe,
On the Starship Enterprise under Captain Kirk.
Star Trekkin' across the universe,
Only going forward 'cause we can't find reverse.

This sort of sums up Space Base in a roundabout kind of way, a game about launching spacecraft into space, only for them to disappear into the void and never return, well except for the victory points and money they sent your way!

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What's in a game?

• Player board: Every player has their own board in Space Base, which has 12 spaces for spaceship cards, these are sectors and are numbered from 1-12. Each board also has 3 tracks, one each for cash, income and victory points. All tracks are numbered 1-40.
• Ship cards: These cards are half the width of normal playing cards. Each card has a purchase cost, lists it's sector number and displays what benefits it provides when activated, including the bottom part of the card which will have it's information displayed upside down in a red box. Red boxes become relevant when a spaceship becomes deployed (More on all this below.).
  These benefits could provide cash, income, victory points or some other gain. 
  A card may also have charge boxes which need to be filled in order to activate its special ability.
  Starting cards: Each player has an identical set of 12 starting cards, obviously for sectors 1-12.
  Spaceship cards: There are 132 spaceship cards and they come in levels 1, 2 & 3, the higher the level, the higher the cost but also the greater benefits they confer.
• Colony cards: Also half-width, when bought, provide a once-only amount of victory points, albeit a large amount.
• Cash cubes: These translucent yellow cubes are used on a player board's cash track.
• Income cubes: Translucent green cubes used on a player board's income track.
• Victory point cubes: These translucent cubes are blue and used to track VPs.
• Charge cubes: More cubes, only transparent! This time used to represent energy or charges and usually placed on ship cards.
• Dice: A pair of normal six-siders.

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As you'd expect, all the components in Space Base are of a good quality; the player boards are sturdy and the plastic dice, while not as nice as wooden ones, are nicely rounded and roll well.
The cards are also good quality, it's understandable that they were made half-width, otherwise the game would have a massive footprint!
A lot of the ship cards have special or unique rules and their iconography is mostly easy to comprehend.

The little acrylic cubes are colourful and distinct, while the dice have a 'cosmic' sparkly finish and the '1' result has been replaced with a rocket.
The ship cards all contain a varied amount of detailed and neat, colourful illustrations of spaceships, along with their names, designations and classes, some are just palette swaps, but that's OK. It's unfortunate that these illustrations are so small though, as they tend to be overlooked. A nice touch is how the background art on the cards matches the background art for their sectors on the player board.
Ship cards are also marked out in bright blue and red, while the colony cards are bright yellow and it all combines to give the game a distinct and overall, eye catching look, it's a great use of primary colours.

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How's it play?
Setup

• Give each player a board and a set of starting ship cards, these should all be placed on their appropriate spots on the board. Give each player a cash, income and victory point cube, place them on the relevant trackers.
• Cash starts at 5, everything else starts at 0.
• Shuffle the level 1 cards into a face-down deck, draw and place 6 cards in a face-up row, do the same for the level 2 and level 3 cards.
  There should now be 18 face-up cards.
• Place the 12 colony cards face-up into ascending sector numbers.
• Each player must draw a card from the level 1 deck,  pay for it with cash and place it in it's relevant sector, the starter card that was in that sector is deployed (More on deploying later.).
• The player who drew the card in the previous step with the highest sector becomes the starting player, other players adjust their starting cash and income as appropriate.

Now we're ready to play.

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On to play
Thematically, as the name suggests, this is a game about managing the spaceships docked at the titular space base, which I guess makes the players glorified intergalactic space traffic wardens! Collect those parking fines!

In Space Base, a player's turn is broadly divided into 2 stages, rolling dice and activating cards, then buying a card.

• Roll dice: The active player rolls both dice.
  Active player: The active player then decides how to use the results of the roll; as a pair or individually. Thus if the dice came up 5 & 3, the active player could use them as collectively as an 8 or as a 5 and 3. Then the active player activates the card(s) that match the number(s) they chose and gains whatever is shown in the blue box. The active player may also activate an effect in a green box. Activating a card may also include adding a charge cube to it.
  Passive players: The other players (Who are known as passive players.) may also use the result of the active player's dice roll in an identical manner, so using the example above they could use the 5 and 3 or 8 to activate cards, however, passive players can only activate the red boxes in matching cards that they've previously deployed. As with the active player, a passive player may activate a card if a charge cube may be added to the red box.
  Passive players can also use the effects in green boxes of activated cards.
  This means the active player always gains something, usually cash or sometimes income or victory points and passive player may also gain some benefit.
• Buy a card: The active player may now buy a card from any of the rows so long as they can meet the price. When a player does buy a card, they must spend all their cash regardless of how cheap a card may be, it seems the game encourages players to spend big! If the active player buys nothing, then they get to keep their cash.
  Deploy: Once a card has been bought, it must be placed in the sector shown on that card and the card that is already in that sector must be deployed. This involves Removing that card from the sector, turning it upside down and sliding it under the player board directly above the sector it was removed from so that only the red box is visible, the info in that box will now be correctly orientated.
  The card that was just bought should now occupy the empty sector.
  Players may deploy multiple cards to the same sector, in fact, it's vital to winning.
  Colony card: When a colony card is bought and placed into a sector, the active player immediately scores the victory points it confers, but that sector then becomes locked for the remainder of the game. A colony card cannot be deployed or replaced, if the active player activates that sector in their turn, they get nothing. However, deployed ships in that sector can still be activated during other player's turns.
  Income: You'll have seen me mention income a couple of times previously and may be wondering what it does?
  As explained above, when a player buys a card, their cash is reduced to 0. The last thing a player does before their turn ends is to increase their cash to the same value as their income. So a player with an income of 4, increases their cash to 4 after buying a card.

Once the active player has completed their turn, play progresses to the player on their left.

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Endgame
Play progresses until a player reaches 40+ victory points, then the current round is completed so all players have had an equal number of turn.
Victory point scores are tallied, highest score wins.

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Overall
Space Base is a bright and cheerful, well made game that at least initially, is a lot of fun to play and gives players lots of options.

​The idea of beginning a game with an already built up tableau is a good one, it means that the active player will always gain something on their turn and it's never wasted.
It's also a fairly accessible game and the basic rules are easy to learn; roll and choose dice, activate the relevant cards and buy more cards.
However, the game does become a lot more complex when more cards come into play, many cards allow the players to shift which cards are activated or purchase more cards, or have charge cube based abilities and so on, some of which can prove confusing.

Being able to split or combine the dice roll when activating cards is an intriguing rule and superficially give players a couple of choices on how to play their actions and build up their tableau. Splitting the dice gives the player the option of activating cards in the 1-to-6 range twice instead of once in the 7-12 range, however, balancing means that the cards in the 7-12 are more powerful, giving greater gains. Should a player choose lower gains more often, or greater gains less often?
​That's the theory anyway.

Let's look at how this might work in practice.
The chance of rolling a 12 or double 6 is 1/36. the odds of rolling a 6 on 2 dice is 1/3, which means activating a 6 is 12 times more likely than activating a 12. However thinking about further, a 6 would activated twice when a 12 is activated, taking the ratio up to 13.
​Thinking about it even further, I realise that a 1+5, 2+4, 3+3, 4+2 and 5+1 give 5 more ways to activate 6, taking the ratio up to 18-1! Does the 12 sector generally gain a player 18 times the benefits of sector 6, It doesn't feel like it?
I've scrutinised the manual and the developers are aware of all these odds (Although they discount a double-result as an extra activation), so it must be as designed.

Why is this important? It's all to do with which cards a player deploys and how the rolled dice are used. Even taking balancing into account, it seems that deploying cards in sectors 1-6 seems much more beneficial than 7-12.
Once a player has covered all first 6 sectors, it means they're guaranteed 2 actions per other player's turn, whereas there's no such guarantee of even 1 activation for sectors 7-12. Even partial coverage seems much more beneficial. It becomes more apparent when you play with more players, in a 5 player game, it'll get you 8 activations between turns!
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At the time of writing, we've played Space Base over half a dozen times or so and for the last few games, I've concentrated only buying cards for sectors 1-6, not worrying too much about what benefit it gives me, only looking to increase my deployed cards; and it's been more successful than not - so far!
It's possible I was lucky to get the cards I wanted, but realistically half of the cards must be for sectors 1-6, so they'll generally always be available. Or it might just have be some lucky dice rolls going my way, or they didn't go well for the other players?

Ultimately, it seems to be that buying and deploying cards to stack up in sectors 1-6 seems like a bit of a no-brainer decision to me, which can be bad for a board game, because if that's the case, it removes meaningful choices.
Having said that, it's not something I'm 100% sure about and I'm still enjoying Space Base, I found a lot to like about it, rolling the dice and seeing what it gives you is always fun. It's a game I'm happy play again when it comes up.