SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence

Marcus brought this to Wednesday group back in the spring and none of us had touched it before, which is usually a recipe for a rough first play, and it kind of was. This is a dense engine game dressed up as a space race, you’re launching probes, scanning for signals, publishing papers, and there’s a real geometry puzzle buried in how your probes move around the solar system that took us most of a session to actually understand. Somebody said cool, I made it to Saturn, and got some good points off it, and that’s basically the emotional arc of the whole game in miniature, quiet incremental payoffs that eventually add up to something.

The turn order swing is the thing I keep coming back to. It’s an open-enough system that you can plan a few moves ahead without it becoming a full solve, which I like, but then somebody passes early because their hand’s dry and suddenly the round ends two turns before you expected and your careful plan just evaporates. We joked about it being basically a diplomatic incident, apologizing to whoever got cut off. That’s not really a flaw, it’s just a thing you have to build into how you plan, and it took us two plays to internalize it.

I don’t play solo much, I’ll be upfront about that, it’s not really my thing, but this is one where a solo mode with a decent bot might actually be worth trying since so much of the tension is about resource timing rather than direct conflict. As a group game it’s a slow burn, a bit fiddly in setup, gorgeous on the table, and genuinely rewarding once everyone stops trying to win the first round. Three stars for now, might go up once we’ve got six or seven plays under our belts and actually know what we’re doing.