I decided to pick up a copy of SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence largely due to its very impressive table presence. Spied from across a convention floor aisle, the nearly 40-inch-long board with its intriguing rotating center discs cuts a fascinating and eye-catching picture.
As the title suggests, the game is about searching for signs of life in the universe. Players take turns performing actions such as sending out probes or scanning sectors of space, with the ultimate goal being to place their markers on board spaces that represent traces of extraterrestrial life. Different actions grant access to different, color coded spaces: magenta for scanning nearby stars, blue for processing the data from those scans, and yellow for landing probes on planets in the solar system. Eventually, when enough spaces of each color have been filled, two out of five possible alien species are revealed, each of which adds more board spaces, cards, and other mechanics to the game.
Eurogames in Spaaaace…
SETI is a fairly standard Eurogame in that the core game play is about collecting resources and converting them into different resources, in the right combination to score the most points. SETI gives players currencies in the form of credits and energy, and a list of actions they can spend those currencies to perform. These actions will gain the player additional resources such publicity, data, and traces of extraterrestrial life, which will eventually translate into victory points. Players also get a hand of cards which offer other ways to gain resources and/or points, usually with better and/or cheaper ways to perform the game’s basic actions.
So far, so Euro, but SETI does have a few interesting wrinkles. The board is divided into three sections: a tech board, where players spend their publicity to gain tech that improves the effectiveness of their basic actions; a planetary board, where players place their tokens to mark the planets they’ve explored and the traces of life they’ve discovered; and the solar system board, which is what really sets SETI apart from other games of this type.
Let’s See What’s Out There
One of the primary player actions in SETI is to launch space probes. These start in the space representing Earth and move around the solar system board, traveling through spaces containing planets, asteroids, and occasionally alien artifacts depending on which alien species is in play. Once a probe is at a particular planet, the player has the option to put it into permanent orbit, or even land on the planet, each of which reward the player with resources and other game effects.
The solar system board is made up of three rotating sections, plus an outer ring representing neighboring stars. At various points during the game (primarily when a player gains a new technology from the tech board), one of the three sections is rotated 45 degrees. The sections are different sizes, and stacked with with the largest on the bottom and the smallest on the top, so that the top ring rotates by itself, but when the middle ring rotates the smaller one moves with it, and when the bottom ring rotates the other two also rotate.
This means that the board is constantly in motion, changing the path from one space to the next. Some of the board spaces are even punched out, revealing the board below, which causes space probes to move when the board is rotated. It’s a neat way to reflect the real-world idea that the planets of the solar system are constantly in motion, and it makes for some interesting decision making during play – you can wait for the planets to line up in order to make your moves more efficient, or just take advantage of it when it happens.
Go to the Moon, and Do the Other Things
The solar system is one of the more interesting elements of the game, but that’s not to say that the rest of the game is dull. There are always interesting decisions to be made – in particular, a player’s hand of cards offers numerous options. Cards can be played for an immediate effect, usually at a cost of one or more credits, and many of them remain in play with a “mission” that awards the player with bonus points or resources when they accomplish a particular goal. This is especially nice in a game with so many options, as it can provide some guidance for what to focus your actions on. Cards can also be discarded for a one-time benefit, usually a resource such as data or publicity, great when you’re just a little short of what you need for your next action. And finally, under certain circumstances they can be added to a pile that provides extra income at the start of each new round.
The game ends after five rounds, which doesn’t seem like a lot but actually works very well as an arbitrary game ending point. Like most resource management games, the early rounds tend to be pretty short as players don’t start with a lot of resources and need time to set their engine-building wheels in motion. Later rounds will go a lot longer, with players having more resources to work with as well as a (hopefully) better sense of the particular goals they’re working towards.
To me, the real attraction of games like SETI is the idea that you can do anything, but you can’t do everything. The goal is to manipulate your resources to score as many victory points as possible before the game ends, but there are many paths to victory. I’ve played games where I focused entirely on launching probes and exploring the solar system, ignoring the aliens all together, and others where I tried to balance my approach and do a little bit of everything, without going too deep into any one area. So far, every approach has been interesting, and in my admittedly limited number of plays, I haven’t found one path to victory that’s easier than another.
I have found that every time I finish a game I want to reset and play again. I can’t think of any higher praise than that.
One Last Note…
One final thing I wanted to mention is that, according to the publisher, all of the seemingly plastic components in SETI are made from recycled material. Most of the non-cardboard counters are made out of post-consumer recycled wood, which the publisher describes here. Additionally, the transparent plastic sun that sits in the middle of the board, as well as the data tokens, are made out of a newer material called re-plastic, which is composed of 100% post-consumer polystyrene. The advanced alien civilizations would be proud.
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