Space Station Phoenix

In Space Station Phoenix, the goal is for your organisation to build an orbiting space hotel for one of four alien races, who have all ominously appeared at the same time above Earth (presumably good hospitality is deemed the prudent course of action when four alien species all turn up knocking).

To prevent grim fights over the thermostat, they must all have their own sectors, (except the hardy Golds who endure in smug stoic survivability, a la the Red Sun Rising books.) No Deep Space Nine Promenade and Quark’s bar here, alas. 

Each player arrives in space to get to this task with five ships and a space hotel core. Each ship has its own function - building up, tearing down, and three flavours of economic development - all of which can be used as a worker placement spot, either by you or an opponent who uses your spot and pays you for the privilege. Play out as many ships as you can for their bonuses until you run out of deployment resources or spaces to deploy to, then take an income action to reset all your workers and go again.

The game moves along relatively nicely, and you get to enjoy the mature Eurogame technology of watching Number Go Up on your opponents turn as well as your own - whenever they use your ships, or take certain other actions, a slow drip feed of incremental benefits keeps you paying attention until the dopamine hit of your next turn.

The largest issue I have with SSP is that the price you pay to use other peoples ships feels too low. In addition, the ‘reset’ action - clearing all your ships - means that play needs to circle back to you before you can use your own ship. 

To expound - building an upgraded version of a ship is a big investment that is rarely worth the payoff. If a player builds an upgraded version of a resource generating ship, everyone else on the table is now strategising as to when they can use it, with them having first dibs on that option to boot. Though other players do have to pay to use it, the cost is in the games least valuable currency and is just not a significant factor compared to the costs of building.

It feels a bit like spending the weekend preparing a nice display of appetizers for a party, and then the guests arrive, ignore you, and argue with each other over how the vol au vents should be divided up between them.

This is compounded by the speed of the game - which is fast enough that shipbuilding payoff returns are further dimished.

The result is there is a second-order effect; now people are not building ships, the ‘get my stuff done and pull up the ladder behind me’ strategy commences. Rush to get your drip feed bonuses as soon as possible, and then start the ruthless chainsawing of your own ships for short-term resources and push towards a quick game end. 

(This can be pretty amusing from a flavour standpoint. Imagining a plucky flotilla of ships arriving and cracking upon their top secret plans to see they involve melting down their shower and microwave to construct the airlock as a first step, continuing to eight months later having deconstructed everything to presumably live forever with some aliens in orbit is a mental picture. Like opening an Ikea chair and it tells you to rip out your toilet to serve as the base.)

I also have some concerns over the balancing of the core stations, especially the ‘rewards having astronauts’ one, but that’s a more minor point.

That said I found myself enjoying SSP, and would play it again, because the core game remains a solid and tight race (though I’m still banning that astronaut board). Maybe that’s because I just enjoy the idea of playing a game how it is Not Supposed To Be Played, like going to a paintball ranch, hiding all the gas cylinders, and making it pistol whips only (please do not do this). I would also say an expansion with some rebalanced bonus ships would easily solve this problem outright.

(As a final aside - playing this does make me idly imagine a world where this was designed in a meta where people regarded the destruction of ships as a last resort failsafe rather than a proactive strategy, which is again, a fun daydream).