Outer Space
- Board's Eye View
- 1 hour ago
- 2 min read
Outer Space is a fast-playing tile-laying pattern-building game where the 2-5 players are competing to score points for creating a galaxy (shared tableau). The game is published by Professor Puzzle.
Players always have a hand of three card tiles, replenished from a draw deck of 10-20 card tiles, depending on the number of players. The card tiles are all divided into quadrants. On your turn, you, place out a tile card from your hand adjacent to or overlapping by at least one quadrant any of the tile cards already in the tableau, with the proviso that you can only cover a Black Hole with another Black Hole. What you score depends on what's on the tile card you've played and how it connects to what's already in the 'galaxy'.
Outer Space comes with five different scoring cards, with the recommendation that for each play you use any combination of just three of them. Any single Black Hole you place out will score 1 point but if it's placed on top of another Black Hole it scores 3 points; 5 points if it's placed on top of a stack of two Black Holes. If you create a three-deep Black Hole, you flip the entire card, taking its all four quadrants out of play for the purpose of further scoring. There are four different types of star, distinguished by colour and shape. Single stars don't score anything but you score a point for all stars that are in a chain connected to matching colour/shape stars. Likewise, Connections score 2 points for each distinct connection they form.
Some quadrants on the tile cards have purple or green backgrounds. These are considered to be Nebulas and if you use the Nebulas scoring card, these score for each quadrant in a Nebula you create or add to, provided it consists of at least two quadrants. The Nebula scoring card tho' is double-sided - purple on one side, green on the other - and you only score for Nebula that match the active (face-up) colour. The card is flipped whenever it's scored. Finally, if you're scoring for Meteoroids, when you place a card tile with a Meteroid on it, you trace its direct path, including over gaps. The Meteoroid scores 1 point for each separate Nebula it passes through and 2 points if it hits a Black Hole, where its path ends.
Whichever combination of scoring cards you play with, Outer Space is an easy-to-play, family-friendly game that plays in a brisk 20-30 minutes. The recommended age on the box is 12+ but much younger children can happily play this galaxy builder. If we had a complaint, it's that the game could be longer; the two-player game is especially over quick - Outer Space comes with 65 tile cards but if you follow the rules for a two-player game you'd only be using 16 of them! However, that's easily remedied by increasing the size of the draw deck.
