SEIT: Space Agencies Expansion - Rocket Booster
Publisher Czech Games Edition’s 2024 opus SETI, the twin-barrel debut from designer Tomáš Holek alongside Galileo Galilei, rocketed up the BoardGameGeek charts these past two years, cracking the Top 15 for both the Strategy and Overall categories. Now the highest ranked game from CGE after overtaking both Through The Ages: A New Story of Civilization and Lost Ruins of Arnak, it was a safe bet such success would bring with it an array of expansions. After a handful of Promo cards, Space Agencies, the first major addition to SETI has reached hobby stores across Australia. CGE have a great track record with expansions – Arnak: Expedition Leaders, TTA: New Leaders and Wonders and Tzolk’in: Tribes and Prophecies are all considered ‘essential’ additions to their base games, so going in I was wondering whether the same would be true for SETI given how generous the base game already was in terms of its contents.
SETI for the unfamiliar is a medium-heavy ‘efficiency euro’, the kind of game that has sweaty players agonising over a single resource or what the best order of operations is for their actions. With striking art and CGE’s ongoing use of unique board shapes (check out Pulsar 2849 for another stunning space-themed effort) SETI grabs players attention from the get go, especially if like me they’ve blinged their game out with a 3D printed ‘light up Sun’. Players launch satellite probes, scan sectors of space for signs of alien life and orbit or land on planets & moons of our solar system in search of resources and publicity. Much of SETI is standard modern euro mechanical fare, with a few things like the ‘area majority’ aspect of scanning and the surprise reveal of two alien species each game setting it apart from other contemporaries. With half a dozen games of play experience, I had yet to master or tire of SETI before incorporating the expansion content. Going in, I was excited to see how the asymmetric factions and quick-start cards would adjust the speed of the game as while I enjoy SETI, it can have a tendency to run long at higher player counts.
Coming in a much smaller box than the CGE rectangle chonk I’ve grown fond of, Space Agencies sets out to address some of the frequent complaints levelled against the base game; it’s slow to start, the alien species can become stale after repeat plays and that there isn’t enough to differentiate how each player engages with the game. It does seem to be in vogue for popular titles to receive a ‘Prelude’ expansion (so named for the Terraforming Mars expansion of the same name that sped up the initial rounds of the game) but in some ways I think this aspect of Space Agencies is the weakest addition, at least for someone who hasn’t yet played the base game to death. At the jump, the ‘quick start’ cards and asymmetric ‘Organisation’ faction mats are linked, with the rules suggesting they are balanced around being used in unison, not piecemeal.
For the first few plays, incorporating the Organisations and quick start cards lengthens an already noticeable setup time which sets a tone for the entire game. To me, this stems from a disconnect between the perceived intent of the module and the practicality of playing SETI, a game in which having more things means players can take more actions. The knock-on effect of the increase in resources and options make the first round with Organisations run longer than it otherwise would in the base game. To compensate, the developers have removed a full round from the game when using this module, finishing after four rather than the base games five. However, any time gained back by this excision is completely offset by the compounding of increased resources and actions each subsequent round. Bluntly, rather than shortening playtime, it maintains and more often extends it. It could be that ‘quick start’ is a misnomer, and that ‘rich start’ would have been a better descriptor – the game doesn’t start faster, players are just better equipped to take some important early actions and the effects on each Organisation will hopefully push people into different strategies. Fortunately for SETI, it manages to exist in the subset of heavier games like Civolution or Age of Innovation where despite running overlong, I don’t really feel the length until the game has concluded. Did it take five hours for my first full-player-count game of Space Agencies? Yes, but I wasn’t in agony waiting for the game to end like I would be by even hour two of some other titles. It does however push it into the increasingly overflowing bucket of medium-heavy modern euros that I don’t want to play again above three players as, aside from impacting the Scanning action somewhat, a fourth player in SETI adds nothing to the experience for me but another 45-90 minutes on the playtime. This is a problem endemic to the modern euro as whole however, so it’s not exactly like SETI is doing something out of the norm.
Everything else found in the Space Agencies box slots in exceedingly well with the base content. Adding in the three extra alien species, 42 new project cards and ‘scanning tokens’ requires no real change to the setup or play that can’t be explained in a few minutes. Expanding the base deck by roughly 25%, the newer project cards are a great addition and don’t significantly alter the feel of SETI in the way something like Ark Nova’s Marine Worlds expansion did to the degree my group refuses to play with it. With closing in on 200 cards, I do hope any further additions to SETI don’t change this number considerably as the stack is approaching unwieldy. The new Aliens here very much feel like ‘weird stuff that didn’t quite fit the base’ in a good way. The Arkhos are framed as abandoned alien tech in the form of an enormous spaceship, adding some ‘push your luck’ interaction with their tile and requiring ongoing commitment to reach their highest scoring spaces under the guise of players ‘breaching security’. Glyphids bring in a set collection race with a slight shared incentive; ‘deciphering’ obtained glyphs on to their tile unlocks a corresponding reward on the Glyphid cards, whilst hoarding Glyphid tokens for the end-game can net up to 20 points for a single unique set of them. Finally, the Amoeba provide a rotating assortment of bonus rewards which shift around their tile every time it’s interacted with, pushing players to time their ventures there with precision. While base SETI houses five alien species, having eight provides much more variability, especially if your group is like mine and groans whenever a particular faction is in the running.
The ‘more’ parts of the Space Agencies expansion are close to an essential purchase for SETI fans, while the reception of its ‘addition’ parts will depend on the group dynamics at play and their tolerance for a longer experience. How seamlessly much of it integrates is demonstrated not only by being permanently housed in my base box, but how the new project cards and Alien species are a default inclusion any time it hits the table. I doubt this is the last we’ll see of expanded content for SETI, but were CGE to state it was in fact now ‘feature complete’, they’d be going out on a high note.
A copy of the SETI: Space Agencies expansion was kindly provided by CGE for review purposes. It was reviewed using a copy of the SETI base game previously purchased by the reviewer.
