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Now in Rocketmen, a 1-4 player game from Polish publisher PHALANX, Wallace challenges you to participate in the space race that started in the mid-20th century and that continues today, albeit mostly in private ventures.
You start with a deck of twelve mission cards, with the destinations for those missions being Earth orbit, the Moon, and Mars. Each mission details what you'll establish at the destination — a base, a hotel, an orbital station, etc. — along with the minimum number of engines you need to reach that destination and the reward you'll receive for doing this: rockets, money, research tools, and a larger hand size for cards. In addition, each card shows in the upper-left corner what the card provides to you when you play it: money, an engine, a computer chip, a flask, a DNA helix, and...nothing. Yes, one of the cards (the Base shown in the image below) is useless for resources, but it provides the most points for a Moon or Mars trip, so there's that.
On a turn, you can buy cards from the six on display, placing them in your discard pile for use the next time you cycle through your deck, but that's standard to most deck-building games. The unique hook in Rocketmen is the concept of establishing your mission, building the resources for that mission, then launching the rocket to see whether you succeed.
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I removed extra cards with one of the deck trimmers
In the image above, the Base is my mission. The cards to the left of my player board on my launch pad support that mission, with the Ion Drive providing four engines, and the other stuff providing tools for the specific destination or the launch itself. I have the flexibility to launch to the Moon or Mars — the two destinations shown on the card — and I need 10 engines before I can launch to the former and 15 before I can launch to the latter. If I lack those engines, I fail automatically. I also have one additional engine — as shown on the chit on my player board — thanks to an earlier completed mission.
The cost to start a mission is $10, which can be paid for by the mission itself (should it bear the $10 resource) or a separate card. Each additional card placed in your launch pad costs $10, and you can't add cards until the mission is established. You can't just pile up resources without some idea of what you're trying to do!
At the end of your turn, if you meet the engine threshold, you can attempt to launch. To do this, you count the number of icons in your launch pad that match your destination — computer chips for Earth orbit, flasks for the Moon, and helices for Mars — then advance the rocket token on the launch track this many spaces.
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You then shuffle the "mission success" deck, which consists of cards numbered 0-4, and you reveal — one by one — 3-5 cards depending on whether you're aiming for Earth orbit, the Moon, or Mars; after each revealed card, advance the rocket token on the launch track as many spaces as the number revealed. Cards in your launch area can modify or replace the cards revealed.
If the rocket token reaches space #8 (for Earth), #10 (Moon), or #13 (Mars) by the time you reveal the final card, your mission succeeds! You remove the mission card from the game (thereby thinning your deck), discard all cards in the launch pad, then claim the reward for that mission. If you fail to reach the target space by the final card, then your mission failed and you must still discard all cards in the launch pad. After all, you launched the rocket and those resources are now gone, despite the mission still being in place.
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Sample engine card and asset cards from the top half of the deck
That said, after each card you reveal, you can choose to abort the launch. Effectively, you can imagine the mission success cards as being evidence that you've planned correctly enough for the mission to succeed. If you reveal 2-3 cards, and they're low numbers (and you can't modify them) and you don't want to rely on the longshot of flipping the lone 4 in the deck, you can abort the launch, discarding cards from the launch pad equal to the number of cards revealed minus one — which means that if you have enough engines, you can always try to launch and flip the first card without penalty.
Given all that, Rocketmen is an amalgam of deck-building, engine-building (via the bonuses you receive from successful missions), and press-your-luck mechanisms, and you're often driven in your choices — at least initially — by your two starting goal cards. These cards show one mission each in Earth orbit, on the Moon, and on Mars. At the end of the game, you choose one of these cards and score 1 point for goal completed, with bonus points if you completed enough of these goals before anyone else did.
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Sample goal cards and crisis card
The first player to complete a mission scores 1 point more than anyone who comes afterward, and while a point here or there might not seem like much, the margin of victory in the four games that I've played on a review copy from PHALANX — two each with two and three players — have all been relatively tight. The first player to the Moon and to Mars pick up a 1 point bonus, and you can also "buy" crises cards in the market to solve them and earn 2 points for each at the cost of having them gum up your deck with their pointy uselessness.
Although in theory you could try to go anywhere on your first mission, you would need to acquire a ton of cards before succeeding with any Mars mission, so you effectively need to complete a mission or two in Earth orbit before heading to more distant locations, a nice replication of what has happened in reality with the probably not accidental result of players often competing to be first on identical Earth orbit missions, which means taking more risks.
Sample cards from the second half of the deck
We worried that the $20 bonus for completing a space hotel mission — money that you can spend each turn to purchase cards or pay for mission supplies — was too powerful, akin to a money strategy in most deck-building games, but that hasn't proved to be the case in practice. Again, part of the game is figuring out when to take risks, and if you build engines on the launch pad, you can take more launch attempts, and the more often you do that, the more chances you have of things clicking into place — as long as you have some number of icons to start with, mind you.
Or maybe not. In four games, no one tried to rely solely on the mission success deck to launch, and maybe we were overlooking that possibility to our detriment since it is possible to hit any of the targets solely with mission success cards. Hmm. I hadn't even considered that until writing this post, but that's possibly because I'm not one to swing wildly at long odds. That said, I won none of the four games I played, so perhaps I should get a clue and change my approach!
To find out more about how to play, see more of the cards you can add to your deck, and experience a few turns of play, check out this overview video:
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