Off the Shelf is back with another game off my shelf. This time, we’re looking at the first board game Kickstarter success story…

Alien Frontiers is a 2-4 player game first published in 2010 by Clever Mojo Games, designed by Tory Neimann. It’s a dice placement and resource management game about the colonization of a new planet, with zones named after different classic science fiction authors. When the game launched on Kickstarter in 2010, no other board games had really had any success on the platform. Alien Frontiers made over $14,000 on a goal of $5,000, which is wild by today’s standards. I did not get the game on Kickstarter, but I was aware of it shortly before it started delivering (it was the subject of my third post on this blog). The game has gone through a number of editions since its initial run, with a fifth edition and a big box released in 2017. I don’t know if there are rules changes from edition to edition, but I’ll be talking about my version.

The game is played on a board showing the surface of an alien planet, as seen here:

Each player starts the game with three dice, as well as one fuel token and one ore. On your turn, you’ll roll your dice and then distribute them to various spots around the board.

• You could place any die at the Solar Converter, which will turn a 1-2 into one fuel, a 3-4 into two fuel, and a 5-6 into three.
• You could place any die at the Lunar Mine to get one ore. However, the die you place must be greater than any other die there.
• You could place any die at the Alien Artifact to get rid of all the cards on display and see new ones. However, if the total of dice you place there equals or exceeds 8, you can take a card.
• You could place a pair of dice with the same value at the Orbital Market. This would allow you to convert fuel to ore at a rate of X:1, where X is the number on the dice you placed.
• You could place a pair of dice at the Shipyard, and spend fuel and ore to build a new ship. In other words, you’ll have another die to roll next turn.
• You could play a sequence of three dice (i.e. 1-2-3) at the Raiders’ Outpost. This would allow you to steal any combination of four resources from your opponents, or one card.
• You could place three identical dice at the Colony Constructor and spend three ore to place a colony directly on the planet.
• You could also just place a die at the Colonist Hub to advance a colony towards the end of its track. When it gets there, you can spend a fuel and an ore to place it.
• You could place a 6 at the Terraforming Station. This allows you to place a colony (at the cost of one fuel and one ore) on the planet immediately. However, that die is now lost to you – you’ll have one fewer to role next turn. You can always replace it at the Shipyard.

Each time you land a colony on the planet, you score a point, plus an additional point if you have control over the region you land in. If you ever lose that colony, or lose control, you lose the point. Control over a region gives you a special benefit, and that’s different from region to region.

The game continues until someone has placed all of their colonies. At that point, whoever has the highest score is the winner.

I got my copy of Alien Frontiers in 2011, so that’s the version I know. Future versions upgraded the colonies to be much fancier, but I like the little wooden lumps from the original (as seen in the picture above). The art has always had that retro pulp sci-fi look, and it’s cool that all the regions on the planet are named after influential sci-fi authors – Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, AE van Vogt, and so on. And the components are quite nice – it’s a well produced game.

The theme of colonizing a planet is good. It probably easily could have been an Earth-based colonial theme, though that probably would have proved to be more problematic these days. Since the dice are your “ships”, the theme does fall apart a little bit, but the look of the game really helps sell the theme.

This is a dice placement game, which was a genre that didn’t have too many entries before it – Kingsburg and Alea Iacta Est are the only ones listed prior to 2010 on BGG, with Troyes coming out the same year. There have been a bunch since then, but the mechanism was fairly novel for the time. And it’s still good, though I think it suffers somewhat due to a lack of variety in gameplay. The board is always set, the places you can send your dice is always the same, the regions on the board is always the same. The most variety the game gives you is in the tech cards, but even those feel a little samey after a while.

There are several other mechanisms in play. Resource management is a big one. Area majority comes into play with the planetary regions. And there’s some ladder climbing involved, as you need to beat what another player has placed somewhere in order to claim things – the Lunar Mine and the Raiders’ Outpost, in particular.

The game also has a fairly significant take that factor to it, which tends to leave a little bit of a sour taste in my mouth. It’s not just blocking spots other players might want to go to – there are ways to steal from them and mess up their plans. The tech cards are a big offender here, especially because they come out randomly. But my biggest problem comes with the Outpost, which is a set spot and allows you to steal all kinds of stuff. You can clog it up with a high straight that other players can’t beat, and when you claim your dice on the next turn, you could potentially end up doing the same thing again.

The scoring system is a little funky, though not really if you think about it. The way it is described is that you’re basically looking at a snapshot of where people are when you look at the scoreboard. It’s a dynamic thing – just because you have points doesn’t mean you will always have those points. Losing colonies and control of regions will bump you back, so you have to keep an eye on things.

It’s probably pretty obvious that I’m not the biggest fan of this game. I really want to be, but this has been the most disappointing game I’ve ever pulled out with people. I think the lack of variety hurts it, and the fairly obvious strategies mixed with the randomness of the dice. It took several games before I found anyone who enjoyed it, and by that time, I wasn’t really feeling it any more.

I will say, however, that I played once with the Factions expansion, and that made a world of difference in the game. It added special player powers, hidden agendas, and new orbital facilities. It made the game a lot more fun. I never got it, however – instead, I just have the basic game, and it’s fine. It’s not one that I’m dying to play, but it’s not bad either. I’m ranking it currently at #40 on my Off the Shelf rankings list.

That’ll do it for today. Thanks for reading!

Thanks to SD Toys for providing a review copy of this game.

It’s been a little while since I’ve gotten a review copy of a game – part of that is by design, it’s been really nice taking a break and not feeling the pressure of needing to write something up. But I’m still planning to do occasional reviews when someone reaches out to me, so here we go with

WordSnap is a 1-4 player word game published by SD Toys. It consists of 100 flexible, interlocking letter tiles in an octagonal tin. To set up the game, you just mix the tiles up face down, then each player draws eight. Players draw a tile and reveal, with the one closest to Z going first.

If you’ve ever played Scrabble, you know how this game plays – on your turn, you play a word of at least two letters and score the points listed on the letters. The first player plays in the middle of the playing surface, and all subsequent words have to build off something already out on the table. Because of the design of the tiles, you can build words horizontally, vertically, or diagonally. Once you’ve played, you draw back up to eight tiles. You can always opt to use your turn to discard some tiles and redraw. Once all tiles have been drawn and someone is out, or if no more words are possible, the game is over. Players deduct tiles in their hand from their final score, and the player with the most points wins.

WordSnap is a very standard word game, and has a lot of similarities to Scrabble. And so, I’m going to frame this review by looking at what distinguishes it from that classic.

1. Scrabble has a board, WordSnap does not. Scrabble has a 15×15 board, which gives you 225 possible places to put words. That seems like a lot, but it can quickly get crowded when words get to the edge. WordSnap is only limited by the size of your table, and it will sprawl. The tiles are much bigger as well, so space can definitely be an issue. Still, I think the boardless nature of WordSnap is a good thing. Plus, it means you can build words diagonally, which is fun.
2. Scrabble pieces are subject to scattering, WordSnap pieces are not. If you bump the table while Scrabble is possible, it’s very likely that the pieces are going everywhere. Unless you have a board with an overlay to keep the tiles in place, and even then, a good knock would still mess things up. WordSnap has interlocking pieces, so that will never be a problem.
3. Scrabble games can be very long. So can WordSnap, though there is a Speed Mode. As the board (playing space) gets more and more words in both games, it can be difficult to decide what the best play is. WordSnap does have a Speed mode, where you can use their app timer as a kind of chess clock to time your turns. For that matter, there’s also a solo mode that’s basically just trying to play out all the tiles as quickly as you can. So, there is a way to speed things up. I would imagine serious Scrabble players also have rules like these in place.
   • It’s worth noting that the WordSnap app is really just a timer. I wish it also had the capability to keep score.
4. Both games reward large vocabularies. If you’re good at finding big words, you’re going to be better at both games. Or, if you’re better at word games in general, you’re going to do well. If your opponent is only making 3-4 letter words, and you’re consistently finding 5-6 letter words, you’re going to be doing better.
5. Both games have a significant luck of the draw factor, though WordSnap might have a bit more of it. If you’re drawing nothing but vowels, you’re going to have problems in both games. Letter distribution is very similar in the two games, though Q and Z are the only ones in WordSnap where there’s only one letter. WordSnap also has four wild tiles as opposed to two in Scrabble, and these are also the double word scorers. With Scrabble, you know exactly where the multipliers are and can strategize around them. In WordSnap, you draw them, so that increases the luck of the draw factor.

IS IT BUZZWORTHY? There’s nothing really new here in terms of gameplay. If you’re not really a fan of Scrabble, or games of that ilk, there’s not much here that would convert you. However, I do think the construction of the pieces makes this a worthy alternative to Scrabble. So if you’re looking for something that isn’t Scrabble, I’d give this one a look.

Thanks again to SD Toys for providing a review copy of this game, and thanks to you for reading!

This edition of Off the Shelf will look at small deck-building game that I first learned through an app. It’s called

Star Realms is a 2014 two-player game designed by Robert Dougherty and Darwin Kastle, published by Wise Wizard Games (originally White Wizard Games, but rebranded in 2021). Dougherty and Kastle are champion Magic: The Gathering players, and had a goal to make an affordable strategy game. Star Realms is a space combat game where players are building their fleet and trying to blow their opponent out of the sky.

As with most deck-builders, players begin the game with a starter deck. In this case, it consists of eight Scouts (with one purchase power each) and two Vipers (one attack each). Players also get 50 Authority, which is their health for the game. It can be tracked using cards in the game, or on a piece of paper. The trade deck, which consists of 80 cards is shuffled and five cards are laid out in a trade row players can buy from. Additionally, some Explorer cards are set to the side, which can be purchased for 2 and give 2 purchase power (plus 2 attack if you trash them). The start player draws three cards from their deck, and the second player draws five.

On your turn, you can play all cards from your hand. Attack points go into an attack pool you can use against your opponent, while purchase points can go to buying new cards for your deck. Attack points can be split between any bases your opponent has in play and their Authority as you see fit. More on bases in a bit. When you purchase cards, they go directly into your discard, and you can buy as many as you want on a turn. Each card is immediately replaced on the trade row when you buy it.

Cards in this game come in four different factions: Trade Federation (blue), Blobs (green), Star Empire (yellow), and Machine Cult (red). If you play multiple cards of one faction, you often get a bonus – cards become stronger and do more damage, or give you more money, or let you draw cards, or give you other benefits. So it’s good to try to get cards from the same faction, but having cards from other factions is OK too. Some cards also have abilities that are triggered when you trash them from your deck. Then you don’t have the cards anymore, but you’ve got a powerful one-time blast of something to use.

Some of the cards are bases, and when played, they stay on the table. These can be attacked as normal, and each has its own defense. You have to completely destroy one for your attack to work, however – if you send three attack against a four defense base, it doesn’t do anything. Some bases are outposts, and these will absorb damage. In other words, you have to destroy them first before you destroy other bases or attack your opponents’ Authority. If you have attack left over after attacking one of these bases, it can be applied to another base, or even to the player themself (as long as they don’t have another outpost in the way).

When a player is done with their turn, they discard all cards played, all cards purchased, and any that might be left in their hand for whatever reason. Then, they draw a new hand of five and it’s their opponent’s turn. If there aren’t enough cards in their deck to draw five, they shuffle their discard and use that as the new deck. Play continues like this until one player has brought their opponent down to 0 Authority. They win.

I believe I got my copy of Star Realms for Christmas in 2014. I played the physical version a few times over the next few months, but I haven’t played the physical version since 2015. Most of my plays have come on the app, which I don’t count for play logs.

One of the best thing about Star Realms is its portability. It’s a whole game in a small package, just coming in a tuck box. It’s easy to carry around, and it’s just cards, so there’s nothing else to deal with. There are a good amount of cards in the box, and there are of course expansions if you just want more. I don’t have any of the expansions, but I might be interested in getting at least the ones that let me play solo sometime.

Gameplay is basic deck-building stuff. It deviates from the Dominion model in that you are allowed to play every card from your hand and buy as much as you want to. Also, it’s attack-based rather than VP-based, which makes more sense considering the theme here. But, other than that, you’re putting newly purchased cards into a discard pile, reshuffling that when your draw deck runs out, and trying to build synergies between the cards so you can do maximum damage.

The four suits of the game are really helpful in building combos, especially since a number of them have extra actions you can do if you play another card of that suit. And the suits all have general tendencies you can focus on. The Blobs are primarily focused on combat. The Star Empire is also combat-focused, and also have the benefit of making your opponent discard cards. The Trade Federation gives you money to spend. The Machine Cult helps you thin your deck. It’s likely that you won’t have a deck full of one of these types of cards, but it’s good to kind of focus on something so you have a better chance of triggering those extra abilities.

The Base mechanism in play here, where certain cards just stay out on the table, adds an interesting layer to the game. Especially because a lot of the bases act as shields, preventing the player’s main authority count from being attacked until they themselves are destroyed. Plus, these bases can be used to make combos, which makes them very strong and desirable to get out.

The game uses a trade row, which is another way it differs from Dominion – this is more like Ascension. It does lead to some luck of the draw – if you buy a card only to reveal something extremely good your opponent can snatch up on their turn, it can be frustrating. But, luck of the draw goes both ways.

Thematically, the game has a pretty good storyline behind it that I hardly ever think about. It’s red cards, blue cards, green cards, and yellow cards, and I’m just trying to hit my opponent as hard as I can while preventing them from hitting me. It’s a combat game, so you’re fighting, which never seems to bother me as much in a two-player game as with larger player counts – it doesn’t feel like you’re ganging up on someone, you’re just playing the game. And that’s fine.

I do like Star Realms a lot, and writing this up has me wanting to play it again. I’ve got it ranked #16 on my current Off the Shelf rankings out of the 46 games covered so far.

And that’s it for today. Thanks for reading!