I picked this solo game up on a lark because it was on clearance at a Kohl’s and the clearance was 75% off or something, so it cost me a couple of dollars. I really didn’t know what to expect from it but it sounded interesting with it’s enticement of puzzles to solve, and my slowly growing interest in playing more Solo Games. Then I sat on it for a few years not actually playing it.
The box contains:
- One Scenario “read first” note
- 3 trifold papers with information about the station
- 2 cards of punch out tile pieces
- 10 Puzzle cards
- 1 Solutions Paper (sealed)
The Puzzle cards and punch out cards are made of thick cardboard material. One thing that became apparently after inspecting the contents was, this game is essentially meant to be played once, only. I didn’t really want to destroy the game, in case I wanted to ass it on or maybe play it again, though there is zero replay ability here really. I instead too photos of the cards, and marked them up in a photo editor, instead of actually writing on the cards and papers themselves.
The basic premise is, you are trapped on an out of control space station and about to collide with an asteroid belt and you need to find a missing part in order to fix the station and save yourself. You have to do this by solving puzzles and finding clues to translate symbols in a “Universal Alphabet”, then translating a secret message.
Initially I was a little disappointed, a lot of the puzzles on the cards are super simple. You shade in parts of a grid, or fill in some simple word puzzles, or do some easy math. Though apparently the math was not that easy because in the case of the Pyramid addition puzzle, I messed up my math and I had the right idea to solving the puzzle, I didn’t have the correct total to start with…. twice….
Addition is hard, ok? Especially with a calculator.
Anyway, where the bigger puzzle comes in is figuring out what the clues actually mean. Some are very straight forward, others are not. I didn’t manage to solve two of the puzzles, the previously mentioned math error, nor one of the word association cards. I did puzzle things out by completing enough of the alphabet to be useful for translating the hidden message. There are no instructions for how a lot of it fits together, and you end up using almost every piece of information given in some way. There are clues hidden in surprising places, places I had been kind of ignoring as simply being “flavor text” at first. Also, the methods for translating the symbols vary, it’s not all just “Hey, the one with the squiglies here is the letter E because this card told me it was directly.”
Overall, I found the game enjoyable, and the latter half was more enjoyable than the first half led me to believe. I would say it actually took me a couple of hours of casual play over a few days to get through everything and find the missing component to “escape the space station”.
