Earn the Most CrypCoin in Alexander Pfister's Skymines

In April 2022, Berlin-based publisher Deep Print Games announced its upcoming release, Skymines, from designers Alexander Pfister and Viktor Kobilke, which is due out in Q3 2022. Skymines plays with 1-4 players in 75-150 minutes, and shares the majority of its DNA with Pfister's 2015 hit Mombasa, re-themed with additional, new content.

Here's a high-level overview of Skymines from the publisher:

Quote:

Fifty years ago, humanity began mining the Moon and the asteroids, and for decades that task was firmly kept in the hands of the World Government. But the turmoils of recent years have caused this enterprise to collapse. Now, adventurous companies and private investors take to the sky to revive this mining network.

As investors, you try to earn the most CrypCoin over the course of seven rounds. You do this by investing mined resources in companies and by spreading outposts of these companies across the Moon (or the asteroids of the Belt) to increase their value. You can improve your earnings by supporting your scientists’ research and by having them collect precious helium-3.

The heart of Skymines is a unique card programming and hand management system that requires careful and clever planning. It provides deep player interaction by letting you invest in any of the four companies as you see fit. And as the combination of company abilities changes each game, there are endless synergies and strategies to explore.

In slightly more detail, players start Skymines with a similar hand of starter action cards, but can acquire new and more powerful cards from a rotating card market display throughout the game. Each round players choose action cards from their hand, place them face down in action slots (beneath the player board), and then reveal them simultaneously to perform the corresponding actions. At the end of the action phase, each card is moved to a resting slot (above the player board), where it is inactive until it's recovered. Before you move the each action card to a resting slot, you recover all cards from exactly one resting slot. This makes hand management crucial since you want to make sure you have flexible options with the action cards in your hand.

There are a variety of actions you can take in Skymines:
---• You can use resources on your cards to acquire new cards or advance on one of the four company tracks.
---• You can use energy points on your cards to expand a company by placing outposts onto new sectors on the Moon, which increases the value of a company's shares.
---• You can research scientist cards and upload your research by advancing your upload marker on your research track, which functions similarly to the bookkeeping track in Mombasa.
---• You can use field scientist cards to store helium-3 by advancing your helium-3 marker on your tank track, which functions similarly to the diamond track in Mombasa.
---• Plus there are bonus actions you can claim for majority bonuses, standard bonuses, and bonus tiles if you can beat your opponents to them.

Most of the actions in Skymines give you some rewards, which always feels good. While the heart of the game revolves around the market manipulation -- increasing your shares in different companies while also influencing the value of each share -- there are many ways to make CrypCoin, thus many paths to victory. Again, when it comes to the core gameplay, there's nothing super new mechanically for Mombasa connoisseurs. But there's more...

Aside from its refreshing new theme, Skymines stands apart from Mombasa with its campaign mode and modules. The campaign has four chapters, and each chapter spans one game with a specific setup that includes one or more of the modules. Although, you can also play any of the modules independently from the campaign.

There is a mission cards module which features six mission cards which don't change the normal rules, but instead provide additional options. With the mission cards, you have special tasks you can complete throughout the game, and when you complete a set of three tasks, you unlock a personal bonus space that only you have access to.

The game board for Skymines is double-sided. One side features the Moon side which you use for the core game, and appears almost identical to the Mombasa game board flavored with the new theme. The other side is the Belt side which introduces another module you can play with.

The Belt side map changes up the way you expand companies, and presents a new layer of variety and different challenges. On the Belt side, you place company outposts onto asteroids and company shuttles onto flight paths between the asteroids. Outposts of different companies can even share the same asteroids. This sounds like a really cool twist to incorporate into the gameplay.

Lastly, there are threat cards you can add to the mix. If you play with the threat cards module, you randomly choose one of the six threat cards and place it face up between shuttle spaces 11 and 16 on the Belt side of the board. Each threat card has a specific consequence that affects all players at the end of the game if it's not dealt with. During the game, players can deal with the threat by spending energy, meeting the threat card's requirement, and expanding a company whose shuttle is on space 11 or 16. The player that manages to deal with it gets to remove the threat card from the game board and keeps it for themself as a wild share, which is denoted on the back side of the card.

Skymines sounds super cool. I dig the theme and how it's incorporated with the unique combination of mechanisms. Plus, the campaign mode and modules sound like they'll add some real fun twists and turns to the core game.

Mombasa is one of few games that got me super excited when I initially read the rulebook, then even more excited as I taught my first game, and then even more excited every moment of playing my first game, and every game of it thereafter. Needless to say, I'm really looking forward to playing Skymines and exploring the new theme, campaign, and modules.