There are few good feelings like a solid snowball. It’s the heart of every great simulator, every city builder, all the classic real-time strategy games, worker placement board games, engine builders, and even the odd shooter.
It’s also the core mechanic behind decades of 4X games, including the clever Aussie-made Mothership: Tabletop Combat. Mothership wanted to make the spirit of bigger sci-fi battlers and eurogames like Twilight Imperium and Gaia Project far more accessible, giving you a singular mothership that you could upgrade into oblivion. It was a clever little twist on the genre that gave you the flavour of a sci-fi 4X without bogging you down in endless phases, several sprawling upgrade trees, or constant minutiae that had to be committed to memory. I was a big fan, especially because any game – board or otherwise – approaching the 4X genre tends to bury the fun beneath layers of spreadsheets and rulesets.
Simplifying some of that complexity makes it a hell of a lot easier to bring new players into the fold, and it’s a philosophy that’s carried into Star Tycoon, the latest game from the Australian developers. The sci-fi capitalist simulator is aiming for a release date of February 2024, having already passed its Kickstarter target with three weeks left to run.
Unlike Mothership, Star Tycoon is less about building your own Death Star and more about acquiring enough of the galaxy to pay for one. Supporting up to 6 players, Star Tycoon’s central driving mechanic is the galactic exchange, a board that tracks 5 separate resources that rise and fall in value as players collect the goods, planets, partnerships and developments necessary to win.
Star Tycoon’s overarching goal is to build a gargantuan galactic megacorp through, well, a bit of old fashioned planet fracking. Every player starts out with one of 6 homeworlds, each of which has a special victory point condition that can only be fulfilled with a certain combination of planets.
Those planets generate one of the game’s 5 resources, as well as having room for additional developments. Those developments boost your production and victory points even further, as well as unlocking the ability to access the black market. From there, you can start to unlock the potential of partnerships, making it even easier to acquire certain types of developments, letting you snowball even further.
Star Tycoon isn’t trying to reinvent the 4X wheel with its structure, themes and overarching mechanics. But what it does is scratch that the economic, worker placement-itch of many bigger eurogames, without requiring a few playthroughs (and several hours) before everyone at the table gets it. My board game group finished a first go of the game with five people in three hours, which is pretty decent given none of us were all learning the rules on the fly.
Most of the learning is really in understanding the icons on all the cards. The game’s actual phases aren’t complicated – you can buy, barter, exchange, reserve planets and refresh the marketplace as much as you can afford every turn. The cost of everything is generally below 5 coins, which conveniently avoids the awkward part of economic board games where the table is waiting for you to remember basic math so you can finally finish your turn. As a result, I’d say the box’s estimation of 20 minutes per player is pretty fair.
There’s a lot that I like about Star Tycoon, and I’ve only had the chance to play a prerelease version. Warp Core Games still have some final testing to do before the game ships next year. If you want to get in on the ground level, you won’t need a galactic loan. The base pledges for Star Tycoon start at $US34, or just over $51 in local dollars, shipping not included. There is also an official mod to play Star Tycoon on Tabletop Simulator, if that’s more to your liking.
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