First Impressions of Alien Artifacts

Some 4X space games have the glacial slowness and inertia of a small moon, Alien Artifacts on the other hand, is as nippy as a fighter fresh from the launch bay. Another upcoming release from Portal Games (see my thoughts on First Martians here), Alien Artifacts boils down the core elements of a big space game into a few decks of cards and let’s you get on with finding the cool combos and scoring the big points.

You will have a handful of resource cards that are refreshed regularly from a big deck that acts as clock for the game. With these resources you discover and exploit 3 different types of sci-fi staple: space ships, technologies and planets. These cards when bought from the relevant decks go on the left side of your player strip, ready to be exploited (costing more resources) and moved to the right hand side of your player board. Ooo movement.

As any capitalist will tell you, there’s quite a lot to gain from exploiting things, and some neat decisions too. All the exploitables have two sides, which you must choose between as you move them across. Spaceships can be used in trade, allowing you to play more resource cards at once, useful as the more you control, the more it costs to gain more. They can also be sent out on missions of peace… To exterminate the alien races of the galaxy and potentially earn the Alien Artifacts of the title. Naturally this isn’t without risk.

Technologies provide extremely useful abilities and come in the largest variety, but as useful as those abilities may be you might want to flip them and pursue their end game scoring potential. Each tech has on the back some scaling scheme of victory point earnings that offer you some real challenges to get the most out of. Finally, planets offer you a steady supply of a single resource, or can be strip mined for a pile of extra resource cards, effectively a temporary boost to your hand size.

As is typical, you want to do everything at once, but you also want to specialise. But the game makes it hard to specialise exclusively. So you need to balance out your economy while making the most of the opportunities you receive from the decks. And did I mention it was fast? Turns involve one action and redrawing, they whip round the table at light speed giving you just about enough time to decide what you are going to do next. It’s an extremely solid title that certainly deserves your attention!

 

This first impressions article is based on a demo at the UK Games Expo.