Rogue Review – Space Base: The Emergence of Shy Pluto

I mentioned previously how Space Base became one of my son’s favorite games after he got it for Christmas. So naturally, we got him the expansion for his birthday. It went over about as well.

There will be spoilers for the campaign portion of the game scattered throughout. You have been warned.

Gameplay- A

The expansion adds a bunch of new cards. They are added to the game slowly throughout the campaign but by the end you have quite a few new types of cards for all the different slots.

Here you can see just a few of the types. The arrows at the top allow you to get the bottom level card rewards in addition to the red ones. As the blue rewards tend to be better, as you normally can only get them on your turn, this can be quite lucrative. Especially if you chain some arrows together. In this set up I was getting rewards from several different slots each turn thanks to arrows.

The little ship icon brought the biggest new feature. During the campaign the ships were used to fight off the big bad space monster in the final event. For all future games, when you rolled a card with a ship icon, you received a little ship token. You can spend these ship tokens on new dice that you roll every turn. The dice are d6’s with five blanks. But since you roll them not only on your turn, but every turn, they come up more often than you think. Especially if you can get multiple dice. Eventually, odds are one’s going to give each time.

The dice have fairly powerful rewards, some giving up to 3 Victory Points, or multiple Income, extra dice rolls, etc. Which leads us to another one of the new mechanics, bonus dice. The expansion came with additional sets of the game’s dice. Certain cards give you the chance to roll these extra dice after rolling the main dice. You are the only one who gets the reward for what those dice roll, regardless of whose turn it is. This can lead to raking in quite a lot at once.

Production- B+

The new cards all fit well enough in the core box. They are all the same quality as the original. There are only two real complaints. First, the new cards that are Tier 1 have a slightly different shade of color to the original Tier 1. This isn’t a very big deal. But it does tell you when a new card is coming up in the deck.

The second is the bonus ship dice mentioned above are much smaller than normal d6’s. This can be good when you’re rolling a bunch of them. But they are also kind of annoying to pick up and keep track of.

Theme- B+

The expansion comes with a short ongoing campaign. Through the story, you learn about an anomaly discovered on the edge of human space. Your fleets are sent to investigate. Each stage of the story adds in new challenges and objectives to work on while playing an otherwise regular game. It’s a decent, if short, story. The final event where you must save humanity from the giant space monster is amusing. Each of the stages offer some form of cooperation which makes an otherwise purely competitive game interesting.

Following the story brings up the theme of the game a bit more than you get just from the base game. Aside from the new objectives during the campaign its just window dressing though.

Expansions- TBD

There is one more available expansion to the game. It adds additional players to the game and theoretically, comes with card sleeves and room for everything from all expansions to store in the box. We’ve not purchased it but I’ve read that despite coming with sleeves, the cards don’t actually fit in the box once they are sleeved.

Conclusion- A

If you like the core box of Space Base, the expansion is well worth getting. The new card mechanics are fun and the story is amusing, if short.