Space Qubes
- Board's Eye View
- 15 hours ago
- 3 min read
At Board's Eye View we seem to have developed a particular soft spot for games where we're the crew of a stricken space ship stumbling around and trying to survive while combating an existential threat. It's a theme we've encountered in semi-cooperative games like Pandora Celeste (Guntower Games) and Lifeform (Hall or Nothing) but it lends itself especially well to fully cooperative play, as in AEG's series of The Captain is Dead games. Kagu Spiele evidently agree because Ilker Sisman's Space Qubes is likewise a cooperative take on the theme.
In Space Qubes, the 1-4 players represent the crew of New Horizons - a research ship exploring a previously unmapped region of space in the year 2273. Players will each control their own character but if you're playing solo you'll need to use two characters. It seems de rigeur to include a cat in any space saga, so Kagu Spiele have included the option of substituting a cat, or even a dog, for one of the crewmen. Crew have tracks on their cards to show their health, oxygen and energy. Your New Horizons ship is a modular board made up of cards representing various rooms and corridors, and for some rooms there will be draw piles containing tools, weapons and artefacts. There are suggested layouts for play but the beauty of creating a modular board out of cards is that you can vary the layout in innumerable combos.
The premise for the game is that the ship's long-range communications are down, and you need spare parts to repair it. These will be among the cards that can be drawn at various locations on the ship. Meanwhile the ship has encountered Quantum Biological Entities (Qubes) that ooze corrosive slime. To win, players need to collect the spare parts needed to repair the ship and send a distress call while fending off the invading Qubes, which are spreading towards the engine room and further damaging the ship and the crewmen who are in the same room as them (losing oxygen wherever there's an unrepaired hull breach). In short, Space Qubes is a cooperative firefighting game where players need to move around the board while keeping the number of Qubes (in practice, translucent green cubes) under control.
Players collectively lose if the ship's drive is destroyed, if all eight rooms are damaged, if all characters are incapacitated at the same time, or if a Qube has to be placed out and there are none left in the supply. The spreading green cubes and the effect they have on the crew and the rooms they infect make comparisons with Pandemic (Z-Man Games) almost inevitable but in this game the Qube spawning is determined by whatever numbers are rolled on an eight-sided die rather than card draws. Tho' there's a luck factor with both, being at the mercy of a die roll feels that much more unpredictable, for good or ill.
The rules are straightforward and mostly intuitive, so this is a game where players can be up and running without a numbing rules overhead. We've liked the way Space Qubes eases you in, tho' just beware being lulled into a false sense of security: the first few turns might seem easy but things can quickly escalate as more Qubes appear and start to overwhelm the crew's capacity for keeping them under control. Adrenaline is among the items to be found in the equipment draw decks, and players will feel their own adrenaline levels rise as the excitement and tension of the game increasingly ramps up.
Kagu Spiele are launching Space Qubes on Gamefound on 24 February. Click here to check out the campaign. In addition to the basic game, Space Qubes will come with various alternative scenarios that incorporate variant rules and different levels of difficulty, so you can expect plenty of replayability.
